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THE BEACON BIOGRAPHIES 

EDITED BY 

M. A. DeWOLFE HOWE 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

BY 

LINDSAY SWIFT 



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BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 



LINDSAY SWIFT 




BOSTON 

SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY 

MDCCCCX 



Copyright, igio 
By Small, Maynard ^ Company 

{hicorporated) 



Entered at Stationers'' Hall 



£"302 



Press of 
Geo, H. Ellis Co., Boston, U.S.J. 



€'Cf.A:a7Sl4 3 



3 

- Ihe photogravure used as a frontispiece 
Z to tds volume is from a small hronze medal 
^ in lossession of the Boston Public Library. 
^ Thepresent engraving is by John Andrew 
<So Snj Boston. 



SAMUEL ABBOTT GREEN 

WHO HAS INSPIRED MANY TO CHERISH THE 
MEMORY OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 



PEEFACE 

This is not a biography of Benjamin 
Franklin^ nor is it a critical survey of his 
relations to and services for the young nation 
of which he was -—to use the language of his 
day — a veritable nursing father. It is ynore 
than anything else a series of impressions, 
brought, I trust, into some kind of harmony 
and sequence, of the career of the most won- 
derful American. If the truth about a man 
may be conceived of as prismatic, then each 
side of such a life as Franklin lived may be 
considered, as in his case has often been done 
well and interestingly, with calmness and 
balance ; but let the crystal be looked at as a 
whole, and the result is astonishing and daz- 
zling. These impressions have been formed 
during twenty-five years of a never-wearying 
intimacy with the great man'' s doings, sayings, 
and writings, including three readings of 
practically all his published works. It is my 
faidt, and not F^^anklin's, if the enthusiasm 
of so many years fails to be catching among 



X PREFACE 

a few of the possible readers of this en- 
deavour. 

To my cherished friend and loyal partner 
in the building of this small book, Edwin 
Munroe Bacon, I owe a very Tceen gratitude. 
If I furnished most of the timber , he certainly 
did a generous share in raising the structure, 
when I needed help as competent as his. 

The portrait is from a bronze medallion 
owned by the Public Library of the City of 
Boston, and not used so often a^ to make it 
other than interesting. 

LINDSAY SWIFT. 

Boston, July 11, 1910. 



cheo:n^ology 

1706 

Born in Boston, January 17 (January 6, 

O.S.). 

1714 

Sent to the grammar school. 



1715 
to a school 
metic. 



Went to a school for writing and arith 



1716 
Taken from school to assist his father in 
the latter' s business of tallow-chandler 
and soap-boiler. 

1718 
Sent to his cousin SamuePs shoj) to learn 
the cutler's trade. Later an apprentice 
in his brother James's printing-house. 

1719 
Composed and printed ^^The Lighthouse 
Tragedy" and a sailor's song on the 
^'Taking of Teach the Pirate." 



xii CHEONOLOGY 

1721 
Employed on his brother's newspaper, 
the New- England Couranty started this 
year. Began contributing to its col- 
umns under the pseudonym of ' ' Silence 
Dogood." 

1722-23 
In charge of the Courant during his 
brother's imprisonment for printing 
matter objectionable to the authorities, 
and afterward its ostensible publisher. 

1723 
Ran away from his brother, and got 
work in Keimer's printing-house in 
Philadelphia. 

1724 
Patronised by Governor Keith, of Penn- 
sylvania. Eevisited Boston at Sir Will- 
iam's suggestion to solicit his father's 
assistance in setting up a printing-house. 
Failed to obtain it, and later arrived 
in London, where he found he had been 
deceived by Keith' s promises. Obtained 
employment in Palmer's printing-house. 



CHEONOLOGY xiii 

1725-26 
Went from Palmer's to Watts' s printing- 
house, where he remained during the 
rest of his stay in London. Became an 
expert swimmer, and proposed to set 
up a swimming school in London. Pub- 
lished (1725) A Dissertation on Liberty 
and Necessityj Pleasure and Pain. 

1726 
Eeturned to Philadelphia with Mr. Den- 
ham, a Quaker merchant, to enter his 
employ. 

1727 

Fell ill of pleurisy, and composed his 
epitaph. Eecovered, and returned to 
Keimer's printing-house. Employed in 
Burlington, New Jersey, on a job of 
printing paper money. 

1728 
Instituted the Junto, club and debating 
society. Formed a partnership with 
Hugh Meredith, and set up for himself. 



xiv CHEONOLOGY 

1729 
Took up the publication of the Pennsyl- 
vania Gazette^ and became an editor and 
public printer. Got the work of print- 
ing the Pennsylvania paper money. 
Published A Modest Enquiry into the Nat- 
ure and Necessity of a Paper -Currency. 

1730 

Dissolved partnership with Meredith, 
and continued alone. Added a little 
stationer's shop to his business. 
September 1, married Deborah Read 
(then Mrs. Eogers). 

1731 
Founded the Philadelphia Library. 

1732 

Began the publication of Poor Richard? s 

Almanac (for 1733). 

His son Francis Folger Franklin born. 

1733 
Began the study of modern languages in 
his spare hours. 



CHRONOLOGY xv 

1735 

Published A Defense of the Bev. Mr. 
HemphilV s Observations ; 
A Letter to a Friend in the Country j Con- 
taining the Substance of a Sermon Preach'' d 
at Philadelphia, in the Congregation of The 
Bev. Mr. Hemphill; 

Some Observations on the Proceedings 
against The Bev. Mr. Hemphill. 

1736 
Established the Union Fire Company. 
Chosen clerk of the General Assembly of 
Pennsylvania. 
His son Francis died of small-pox. 

1737 
Appointed postmaster of Philadelphia. 

1741 
Began the publication of a monthly 
magazine, the first planned and the sec- 
ond issued in the American colonies. 
After six months it ^^ quietly expired. ^^ 

1742 
Invented the Franklin stove. 



xvi CHEONOLOGY 

1743 
Drew up '^Proposals for Establishing an 
Academy." 

1744 
Established the American Philosophical 
Society. 

His daughter Sarah born. 
Published An Accou7it Of the New In- 
vented Fennsylvanian Fire- Places, 

1746 
His attention first drawn to electricity. 
Published Reflections on Courtship and 
Marriage : In Two Letters to a Friend. 

1747 
Stimulated the establishment of a militia 
by the government, and fostered the or- 
ganisation of a voluntary association for 
the general defence of the city and 
province. 

Published Flain Truth : Or, Serious Con- 
siderations On the Fresent State of the 
City of Fhiladelphia and Frovince of 
Fennsylvania. 



CHEONOLOGY xvii 

1748 
Took David Hall as a partner. 

1749 
Founded his proposed Academy, which 
became the Academy and Charitable 
School of the Province of Pennsylvania, 
and ultimately developed into the Uni- 
versity of Pennsylvania. 

1751 
Published, in London, Experiments and 
Observations on Mectricity made at Phila- 
delphia in America, 

1752 
Proved the identity of electricity and 
lightning by experimenting with a kite. 
Made a member of the Eoyal Society of 
London. 

Invented the lightning rod. 
Elected to civic positions, and a member 
of the General Assembly for Philadelphia. 

1753 
Member of a commission from the Council 
and Assembly to confer with the Indians 
of Carlisle with respect to a treaty. 



xviii CHRONOLOGY 

1753 (continued) 
Appointed; jointly with William Hunter, 
Postmaster-General of America. 
Given tlie degree of Master of Aj-ts by 
Harvard College and by Yale College. 
Eeceived the Sir Godfrey Copley medal 
from the Eoyal Society of London. 
Published, in London, Supplemental Ex- 
periments and Observations on Electricity. 

1754 
Commissioner for Pennsylvania at a con- 
gress of commissioners at Albany to con- 
fer with the chiefs of the Six Nations. 
Drew up his Plan for a Union of the 
Colonies. 

Published, in London, New Experiments 
and Observations on Electricity made at 
Philadelphia in America, 

1755 
Aided General Braddock by establishing 
a system of transportation of military 
stores. 



CHRONOLOGY xix 

1756 
Entered military servicej in charge of tlie 
north-western frontier. 

1757 
Sent to London as agent for the province 
of Pennsylvania. 

1759 
Eeceived the degree of Doctor of Laws 
from the University of St. Andrews, 
Edinburgh. 

Freedom of the city conferred upon him 
by the corporation of Edinburgh. 
Much time this year devoted to electrical 
experiments in England. 
Published, in London, Some Account of 
the Success of Inoculation for the Small-Fox 
in England and America. 
Published, in London, Fardble against 
Persecution. 

1760 
His mission on the issue with the Proprie- 
taries brought to a successful close. 
First separate edition of the Way to 



XX CHEONOLOGY 

1760 (^continued') 
Wealth (^^Father Abraham's Speech," 
from Poor Bicliard''s Almanac) published. 
Published, in London, The Interest of 
Great Britain Considered, With Regard to 
her Colonies. 

1761 
In the autumn made a tour of Holland. 

1762 
Eeceived the degree of Doctor of Civil 
Laws from the University of Oxford. 

1763 
Travelled through the northern colonies 
to inspect their several post-offices. 
Appointed one of the commissioners for 
Pennsylvania to dispose of the public 
money appropriated for raising and pay- 
ing forces to act against the Indians. 

1764 
Defeated of re-election to the Assembly 
in an exciting voting contest. 
Appointed by the Assembly agent of the 



CHEONOLOGY xxi 

1764 (continued) 
House to present their petition to the 
King for a change of government. 
Sailed for England in November. 
Published A Narrative of the late Massa- 
cres, in Lancaster County; 
Cool Thoughts on the Present Situation of 
our Fuhlic Affairs; 

A Petition to the King, for changing the 
Proprietary Government of Pennsylvania 
into a Royal Government; 
BemarJcs on a late Protest Against the 
Appointment of Mr. Franklin an Agent for 
this Province. 

1765 
Presented to Grenville copy of the reso- 
lution of the Pennsylvania Assembly 
against the proposed Stamp Act. 

1766 
Efforts to obtain the repeal of the Stamp 
Act. His examination before the House 
of Commons^ followed by repeal. 
Eeappointed agent by the Pennsylvania 
Assembly. 



xxii CHRONOLOGY 

1766 (continued) 
Published, in London, The Examination 
of Dr. Benjamin FranMinj etc. 
Pnblislied, in London, Physical and Me- 
teorological Observations. 

1768 
Authorised to act as agent in London 
for Georgia. 

1769 
Chosen by the House of Representatives 
of New Jersey as agent for that province. 

1770 
Appointed by the General Court agent 
for Massachusetts. 

1771 
Visited Ireland, and received by the Irish 
Parliament at Dublin. Also visited 
Scotland. 

Wrote the first part of his Autobiog- 
raphy. 

1772 
Transmitted the Hutchinson - Oliver 
letters to Massachusetts. 



CHEONOLOGY xxiii 

1772 (continued) 
Published, in London, Two Letters, ad- 
dressed to the Eight Bev, PrelateSj who a 
second Time rejected the Dissenters' Bill. 

1773 
Examination before the Privy Council 
on the petition of the Massachusetts As- 
sembly for the removal of Governor 
Hutchinson. 

Published, in the London Advertiser, 
Rules for Beducing a Great Empire to a 
Small One. Later (1793) issued in pam- 
phlet form. 

Published, in London, [Lord Despen- 
ser's] Abridgement of the Boole of Com- 
mon Prayer. Franklin wrote the pref- 
ace and abridged the Catechism and 
Psalms. 

1774 

Dismissed from the office of deputy post- 
master-general of ^orth America. 
Published, in London, Of the Stilling of 
Waves hy means of Oil; 



xxiv CHEONOLOGY 

1774 (continued) 
Experiments and Observations on Elec- 
tricity made at Philadelphia. , . . To which 
are added, Letters and Papers on Fhilosoph- 
icdl Subjects. 

1775 
Eeturned to Philadelphia. 
May 6, elected by the Pennsylvania 
Assembly a delegate to the Continental 
Congress. The same month elected Post- 
master-General of the colonies. 

1776 
One of three commissioners sent on a 
fruitless mission to Canada. Presided 
over the Constitutional Convention of 
Pennsylvania. Elected by the Con- 
tinental Congress one of a committee to 
frame a Declaration of Independence. 
Elected one of three commissioners to 
France. In December arrived in France. 

1778 
Formally received at the French court. 
Appointed minister plenipotentiary to 
France. 



CHRONOLOGY xxv 

1778 (conUriued) 
Issued at Passy the bagatelle, The 
Mphemera; an emblem of Human Life» 

1779 
Wrote the Morals of Chess, afterward 
published in many editions. 
Issued from his press, at Passy, The 
Whistle. To Madame Brillon. 

1780 
Issued from his press, at Passy, The Dia- 
logue between Franklin and the Gout 

1781 
Appointed a member of the commission 
to negotiate a treaty of peace between 
England and the United States. 

1784 
Resumed work on his Autobiography. 
Issued from his press, at Passy, Advice to 
such as would remove to America; and Be- 
marJcs Concerning the Savages of North 
America. 



xxvi CHRONOLOGY 

1785 
His resignation as minister to France 
accepted by Congress. Returned to 
Philadelphia in September. 
Elected president of the Commonwealth 
of Pennsylvania. 

1786 
Re-elected president of Pennsylvania. 
Published Maritime Observations: In a 
letter from Doctor Franklin to Mr. Alphon- 
siis Le Boy, member of several Academies, 
in Paris. 

1787 

Again re-elected to the presidency of 
Pennsylvania. Appointed a delegate to 
the convention which framed the Con- 
stitution of the United States. 
Published Observations on the Causes and 
Cure of SmoJcy Chimneys. 

1788 
Brought the Autobiography down to 
1757. 



CHEONOLOGY xxvii 

1789 
Contributed to the press papers in behalf 
of the abolition of slavery. 
Wrote, but did not publish during his 
life, Observations Belative to the Intentions 
of the Original Founders of the Academy 
in Philadelphia. 

1790 

Died in Philadelphia, April 17, aged 
eighty- four years and three months. 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

I. 

To send any one who reads these 
compact pages back to the fount and ori- 
gin of all essential knowledge of Frank- 
lin, his own immortal Autobiography, 
is motive enough for writing them. 
Many have considered him, and from 
various standpoints. In later years Mr. 
Paul Leicester Ford views him polygon- 
ally. Professor McMaster as a man of 
letters, and Mr. Morse as an American 
statesman, but all have drawn on the 
original vintage, reduced to suit a large 
variety of palates. Parton's second 
pressing is still so excellent reading that 
only a condensation of the most straight- 
forward sort can hope to find an excuse 
for itself on the plea of novelty. 

A man who first begins to write of 
himself when sixty-five years of age is 
able to discard irrelevancies and to ig- 
nore trivialities. With a past of already 



2 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 

great achievement and a still more won- 
derful old age before him, Franklin felt 
no need for false shame, for it was his 
object to account for his career and not 
to extenuate his weaknesses or to mag- 
nify his renown. It was with no awk- 
wardness therefore that he speaks of the 
^'poverty and obscurity" in which he 
was born on January 6 (O.S.), 1706, 
in the town of Boston, in the Province 
of Massachusetts-Bay, of Josiah and a 
second wife Abiah (Folger) Franklin. 
He was his father's fifteenth child — 
there being in all seventeen — and his 
mother's eighth. About where the 
building formerly occupied by the Bos- 
ton Fast now stands, below the corner 
of Milk Street and Washington, then 
Marlborough Street, was his birthplace ; 
and on his natal day he was hurried to 
the Old South Meeting-house opposite — 
the first South meeting-house that the 
Old South replaced — and piously dedi- 
cated to the God of his fathers, — borne 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 3 

there, so legend has it, in the arms of his 
own mother. The family, which took its 
name from the estate of its members as 
English freeholders, was from North- 
amptonshire, and, if socially obscure, 
was not mean. Josiah came with his 
first wife to New England in 1682 : his 
second wife, Franklin's mother, was the 
daughter of Peter Folger, ^^a godly, 
learned Englishman ' ' ; and thus on both 
sides Franklin came of an unmixed 
stock, of the sort which takes most 
kindly and readily to transplantation. 
He himself was almost a perfect proto- 
type of what we understand to be Ameri- 
canism, — resourceful, shrewd, somewhat 
idealistic, and largely practical j as a 
citizen, generous and helpful j but, as an 
individual, dextrous to win advantage 
beyond the point where the scrupulous 
draw the line. 

Franklin went to grammar school 
when he was eight years old, but ^^I do 
not remember when I could not read,'' 



4 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 

he says. From Grandfatlier Folger lie 
inherited a doleful tendency to verse- 
making. From his paternal uncle Ben- 
jamin, who was also poetically inclined, 
and who was ^^a great attender of ser- 
mons,'^ he learned a rough sort of short- 
hand, and received a bent toward books. 
In arithmetic he ^^made no progress," 
though proving himself so fair a scholar 
in other respects that he was, at ten 
years of age, put to his father's trade of 
^^sope" -boiling and tallow- chandlering. 
His astonishing normality was shown by 
an early desire to go to sea, but he went 
no further than to sail small boats with 
other boys. In these sports he was 
^^ commonly allowed to govern." The 
elder Franklin had this aptitude for 
leadership, and was frequently consulted, 
by grander people than he himself pre- 
tended to be, for his opinion on town and 
church affairs. Life with the Frank- 
lins was simplicity itself. Conversation, 
meant to be instructive and perhaps ele- 



BENJAMm FRANKLIN 5 

vating, was cultivated. What went into 
the heads above the board was held to be 
of more consequence than the food itself. 
In later years Franklin wrote signifi- 
cantly: ^'To this day if I am asked I can 
scarcely tell a few hours after dinner 
what I dined upon.'^ This indifference 
to the joys of the palate has been noticed 
in men of extraordinary ability. Cau- 
tious habits and evenness of temperament 
carried the father through eighty-nine 
years and the mother through eighty- 
five years of a life which they undoubt- 
edly enjoyed after their own sober and 
discreet fashion. 



II. 

The father's trade was not to the boy's 
liking, not so much because he felt above 
it as because it presented to his active 
mind no healthy and stimulating obsta- 
cles. He was already showing aptitude 
for mechanical devices, and was storing 
his receptive mind with such reading as 
he was able to procure with his small 
spending money. Toward the Fil- 
grwi's Progress, Plutarch's lAves, and 
mostly, perhaps, to Cotton Mather's 
Essays to do Good, he shows a deep grati- 
tude. At twelve he was indentured as 
a printer's apprentice to his brother 
James till his coming of age, partly be- 
cause he was bookish and partly because 
the sea still held out its alluring charms 
to the restless boy. 

His reading, which continued late 
into the nights, tended to make him dis- 
putatious, a fault into which, Franklin 
says, persons of good sense seldom fall, 



BEl^JAMIN FEANKLIN 7 

^'except lawyers, university men, and 
men of all sorts that liave been bred at 
Edinburgh/^ — a very sour observation 
for so complacent a man as Franklin to 
make, though it betrays the not uncom- 
mon suspiciousness of the unacademic 
mind. Among the various polemics 
which he held with his chum, John 
Collins, was one on '^the propriety of 
educating the female sex,'^ in which the 
young apprentice took, as he usually 
did, the right side. These and other 
ambitious strivings to further his knowl- 
edge of books and to model himself after 
the best style, in particular that of the 
Spectator, brought upon him the atten- 
tion of his own family, if of no one else. 
His radicalism in matters of religion 
early showed itself by an evasion, as far 
as he was able, of ^^the common attend- 
ance on public worship.'^ The eyes of 
his understanding were levelled in all 
directions of human interest, usually 
with entire sanity, sometimes with the 



8 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

perversity of mere youth. He even 
ventured a prolonged experiment in the 
vegetable diet, when he was sixteen, 
and found it intellectually profitable. 
At this time he happened on three 
books of particular value to him, 
Locke's On the Human Understanding, 
The [Port Royal] Art of Thinking, and 
the before- mentioned Essays to do Good, 
by Cotton Mather. It is wonderful how 
readily he seized on the essence of books. 
His reading in Xenophon's Memorabilia 
helped to lead him into that extremely 
tolerant method of argument which never 
forsook him. The Greek restraint and 
euphemism corresponded happily with 
his own mental cheerfulness, and he con- 
ducted all argumentation with an easy 
and broad-shouldered effect of strength 
and responsibility. 

Law and journalism have been the 
two surest roads for American ambition 
to travel. Benjamin Franklin veered 
naturally enough into work on his 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 9 

brother James's newspaper, the fourth 
to be undertaken in the English colonies. 
There was no legal career open in Bos- 
ton in those days, but, had there been, 
the lad would not have been inclined to 
follow it. The apprentice soon began 
to send modest contributions to this New- 
Mngland Courantj first anonymously, then 
openly, somewhat to the irritation of the 
brother, a rather dour body, who oc- 
casionally beat the young contributor, 
not because the latter was vicious, but 
because he was abler than his surly 
master. This fraternal treatment filled 
Franklin with ^^that aversion to arbi- 
trary power,'' as he says, ^^that has stuck 
to me through my whole life." A little 
man would have grown up to bully 
others as he was himself bullied, but 
Franklin was small in nothing except 
his economies, and then only to himself. 
When James Franklin was imprisoned 
for publishing matter offensive to the 
General Court, the younger brother con- 



10 BEIsTJAMIN FEANKLIN 
ducted the paper, whicli a little later 
by a pardonable trick (in the return of 
his indenture with his discharge written 
on the back of it, and the substitution 
privately of a new one for the remainder 
of the term) appeared under the name 
of Benjamin Franklin. One trick led 
to another. The new publisher, having 
secured his indenture, soon refused to 
hold himself bound by the new and 
secret agreement, and left his brother. 
For this he was promptly blacklisted by 
all the master printers in Boston, and this 
experience sent him at the age of seven- 
teen on a three days' voyage, in company 
with his friend Collins, to i^ew York, 
and thence, finding no employment there, 
on a turbulent passage to 2^ew Jersey, 
and overland, mostly on foot, to Phila- 
delphia. 



HL 

Early on a Sunday morning, clad in 
workaday clothes and travel-stained, 
Benjamin Franklin arrived in this enter- 
prising town, which henceforth was to 
divide the honours with Boston as having 
fostered the most comprehensive genius 
of American life. With a Dutch dollar 
and a shilling's worth of copper in his 
pocket the Boston-bred lad sought to buy 
^'bisket,'' but had to content himself 
with three penny rolls. After saunter- 
ing past the house where lived Deborah 
Eead, who was later to be his wife, he 
found himself in a Quaker meeting- 
house, where he fell asleep. 

He soon secured employment with one 
Keimer, a rather inefficient printer, the 
poorer of the only two then in Philadel- 
phia, who, himself an author, was fonder 
of books than of making them. Lodg- 
ing was taken with Mr. Eead, and 
Franklin began to live comfortably, 



12 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 
^'forgetting Boston as much as lie 
could. '^ Being of good address, lie won 
tlie attention of Sir William Keith, gov- 
ernor of the province, who would have 
the boy to dine occasionally at his own 
table, much to the astonishment of 
Keimer. Encouraged by offers of the 
governor to turn the public printing 
into his hands if he would set up on his 
own account, and by the promise of Sir 
William that, to obtain Josiah Frank- 
lin's assistance in the venture, he would 
undertake to reconcile the father and 
son, Franklin took passage for Boston in 
April, 1724, after seven months' ab- 
sence. 

Though this unbiblical prodigal re- 
turned, to the joy of his family, with five 
pounds sterling in his pocket, the elder 
brother carried out his part of the famil- 
iar parable by turning his back on such 
audacious prosperity. James Franklin 
was something of a churl, and this visit, 
in which were flourished dazzling hand- 



be:n^jamin feanklin is 

fuls of silver, ^ ^offended Mm extremely.'^ 
Josiah Franklin declined, thongli cour- 
teously. Governor Keith's suggestion that 
he set up the enterprising young printer 
in business, but was evidently impressed 
by the attention of so important a per- 
sonage. The frugal old man gave his 
approbation and blessing to his son as he 
started for New York by the way of 'New- 
port, where lived Benjamin's brother 
John, who was glad to see his relative, 
and commissioned him to collect a con- 
siderable debt. The voyage from IsTew- 
port to New York was safely passed. 
There his old chum Collins again crossed 
his adventurous way, changed by brandy- 
drinking from an industrious and studious 
lad into a purposeless young man. The 
sturdy printer, not deserting his besotted 
friend, took him in tow to Philadelphia. 
Not long afterward Collins, still in debt 
to his benefactor, took passage for the 
Barbadoes, and disappeared from Frank- 
lin's ken. At this time was committed 



14 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 

one of those ^^ errata'^ of wMcli Frank- 
lin, in a sort of lustratory mood, was 
fond of confessing. This erratum was, in 
plain, the embezzlement of money which 
he had been charged to collect for a 
trustful New Englander, a friend of his 
brother John. The sin was committed, 
as this sin so often is, not to help himself, 
but another, — the worthless Collins. 

It was also about this time that, 
tempted by that most irresistible of all 
odours to the hungry man, — fried fish, — 
he abjured vegetarianism and fell back 
for a while amiably into the dietary 
traces. But he continued to experiment 
with food, and induced the long-bearded 
and gluttonous Keimer, with whom he 
had again resumed business relations, to 
adopt a simple method, at a cost of 
eighteen pence a week each, until 
Keimer weakly fell from grace under the 
blandishments of roast pig. Self-im- 
provement in one way and another was 
never out of Franklin's mind, and his 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 15 
determination and fixity of purpose are 
never better shown than by his friend- 
ships, especially with men of his own 
age. Osborne, Watson, and Ealph, who 
afterward became a literary man in a 
small way, and Benjamin himself took 
Sunday strolls, argued, compared notes, 
criticised each other freely, though in 
the main amiably. 

In his nineteenth year, having come 
to a good understanding with Miss Eead 
as to the strength of their mutual affec- 
tion, and having taken berth with Ealph 
on the '^annual ship'' which plied be- 
tween London and Philadelphia, Frank- 
lin, within a few days of his nineteenth 
birthday, reached London on December 
24, 1724. 



IV. 

Franklin at once learned that he had 
been lied to by Governor Sir William 
Keith, by whose flatteries and promises 
he had been led to take this voyage. Hum- 
bugged as he was by the great man, im- 
perturbable good nature led him to write 
Keith down as '^otherwise an ingenious, 
sensible man, a pretty good writer, and 
good governor for the people.'^ 

Ealph became a hanger-on at the lit- 
erary and theatrical kennels of the day, 
while his virtuous pal went to his trade 
at Palmer's shop in Bartholomew Close. 
A very good specimen of Franklin's 
skill in composition at this time exists in 
the second edition of Wollaston's Beligion 
of Nature, to which Franklin wrote a re- 
ply, A Dissertation on Liberty and Neces- 
sity, Pleasure and Fain, which proved too 
sceptical to suit his master. This pam- 
phlet was ^^ another erratum,'^ not so 
great a one, however, as forgetting ^^by 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 17 

degrees ' ' the engagement with Miss Bead, 
and omitting to write her more than one 
letter, and that one only to tell her that 
he was ^^not likely soon to return." 

The next erratum was more serious, 
but frankly told. Ealph, forgetting his 
own wife and child, had taken up with 
a young milliner. In Ealph's absence 
from London his friend sought to take 
his place. The lady's affections, if irreg- 
ular, were loyal, and Franklin was not 
only discomfited, but by his treachery 
gave the poetaster a chance to relieve his 
jealous anger by repudiating all former 
obligations, monetary and other, to his 
more prudent associate. 

Franklin's literary venture with the 
Beligion of Nature brought him into some 
vivacious company of a bookish turn 
who gathered at an ale-house. From that 
time on till his first experience in London 
ended he worked at Watts 's printing- 
house, near Lincoln's Inn Fields. It was 
here that he set his intemperate fellows 



18 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 

the admirable example of not drinking 
beer during working hours. He kept 
himself strong and well on water, while 
they guzzled after the immutable fashion 
of the British workman. ^'Thus/' he 
rather sadly comments, ^Hhese poor 
devils keep themselves always under." 
Failing, on a change of work, to set up 
the usual five shillings for drink, Ben- 
jamin was so thoroughly ignored, and so 
worried by the ^^chappel ghost," that 
he at last yielded to his tormentors. He 
was, however, able to bring the force of 
his example to bear on some of the 
printers in regard to habits of food 
and drink, and the shrine of St. Monday 
was correspondingly deserted. 

The young American's bodily strength 
was then as remarkable as his mental 
vigour. He could carry upstairs and 
down a large locked ^^form" of type in 
each hand, — a feat at which his fellows 
wondered, for one form at a time was 
usually carried, requiring the use of both 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 19 

arms. At swimming he was from boy- 
hood to mature life a marvel. On one 
occasion he swam from Chelsea to Black- 
friars, ^^ performing on the way many 
feats of activity." Years afterward he 
suggested that the Channel might be 
crossed by a swimmer lying on his back 
and drawn by a kite. Fearless in all 
experimentation, it is a wonder that 
Franklin did not essay this feat himself. 
So fond, indeed, was he of fresh air and 
clean water that he seems almost to have 
discovered their hygienic uses to men. 
In this as in many other ways he was 
essentially a modern. 

Tired at last of London, he agreed with 
Mr. Denham, an old Quaker merchant 
then there, to return to Philadelphia as 
his clerk for fifty pounds a year, Pennsyl- 
vania money, — a less sum than he was 
earning in England. It is fortunate that 
he so planned, else had he been tempted, 
under the patronage of Sir William 
Wyndham, to open a swimming school. 



20 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

After eighteen months spent sometimes 
in folly, but mostly in wise living, Frank- 
lin sailed on July 23, 1726, from Graves- 
end, a ^ ^ cursed biting place . ' ^ ^ ^ Albion, 
farewell ! " he exclaims in his lively jour- 
nal of the voyage, as he watches the cliffs 
of England fade. The weariness of travel 
was relieved at draughts, a game in which 
he much delighted, and then again at 
cards. Franklin sagely observes that one 
should not care for consequences in play, 
for, of two persons equal in skill, he who 
has the more anxiety is sure to lose. 
What with philosophical and social ob- 
servations, the catching of dolphins, the 
meeting and passing of vessels, the voyage 
wore on, till at the end of about ten 
weeks the young Franklin began to feel 
the exhilaration common to all who have 
sailed westward from the fogs and clouds 
of England to the gay, clear air of Amer- 
ica, and presently he was again at home 
in Philadelphia. 



On landing, he soon learned that his 
neglect of Miss Eead had borne fruit, for 
she had been induced by friends to marry 
a worthless potter, named Eogers, who 
soon ran off to the West Indies, where he 
supposedly died. 

Franklin's new employer, Denham, 
opened a store, and gave him a large re- 
sponsibility in the venture, until both fell 
sick. Franklin was brought so low by 
pleurisy that he felt loath to recover. 
Economical even when bargaining with 
death, he felt that, if he lived, he should 
^'have all that disagreeable work to do 
over again." A virtuous contempt of 
the incident of dissolution was character- 
istic of his large nature, though he was 
prudent to a degree in matters of health 
and wise living. 

On the death of Denham and after 
some hesitation, Franklin again entered 
Keimer's employ, and brought the latter^ s 



22 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 
printing business up to a better standard. 
His resourcefalness led him to make 
moulds and matrices to sui)ply a sad de- 
ficiency of ^^ sorts," to engrave occasion- 
ally, and to make ink. So useful a ser- 
vant, if he works unselfishly, is seldom 
appreciated, and it was in the order of 
human nature that the fatuous Keimer 
should find an early occasion to dismiss 
his factotum. For a short time he re- 
turned to Keimer' s ofi&ce to help him out 
on a job of printing paper money for New 
Jersey, to facilitate which Franklin con- 
trived a copper-plate press. Meanwhile 
he had arranged with a Welshman, Hugh 
Meredith, also an employe of Keimer' s, 
whom Franklin had helped to forsake 
strong drink, to set up a separate estab- 
lishment. 

The Autobiography halts at this place 
a moment to explain its author's attitude 
at that time toward religion and morals. 
Brought up by his parents ^^ piously in 
the Dissenting way, ' ' he found himself at 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 23 

fifteen no little of a sceptic. Perversely 
tui^ned in favour of Deism by reading some 
of Sir Eobert Boyle's Lectures which were 
directed against it, he came to regard the 
optimistic conclusions of the deistic doc- 
trine of little practical value. While 
still rejecting Eevelation, he did, how- 
ever, hold fast to the certitudes that 
^Hruth, sincerity and integrity ^^ were of 
prime importance. He thus was able to 
assert that he had a ^^ tolerable character 
to begin the world with/' though in his 
original draught he states that there were 
some foolish intrigues with low women, — 
an admission which he allowed himself 
on the margin to modify considerably. 
No trace of spiritual exaltation appears 
in this frank confession, but there is at 
all times evident a reaching forward to 
a homely, practical, and not unworthy 
standard of life. 

The year of his start with Meredith, 
or in 1728, he had founded the Junto, 
fijst called the Leather Apron, that 



24 be:n^jamin feanklin 

small but admirable beginning of 
greater things. On Friday evenings this 
little club met to discuss philosophy, 
morals, and doubtless the questions of 
the day, in a spirit of equanimity and 
good faith. The first members were a 
scrivener's clerk, a mathematician, a sur- 
veyor, a shoemaker, afterward a mathe- 
matician, a joiner, a merchant's clerk, 
Franklin himself, and three fellow- work- 
men of his at Keimer's. Two of these 
associates afterward became surveyors- 
general, and one a merchant of note; but 
the names of all of them have passed 
into oblivion, except that of the founder. 
Many and varied were the questions put 
and answered, and great was the indirect 
good done these young men by their 
serious endeavour. 

It was a time of prodigious industry 
for the young firm, and twenty-four hours 
were hardly long enough to suit their 
measure of the day. ^^The industry of 
that Franklin," said Dr. Baird, a Scotch- 



BEISTJAMIN FEANKLIK 25 
man^ ^ ' is superior to anytMng I ever saw 
of the kind 5 I see him still at work when 
I go home from the club ; and he is at 
work again before his neighbours are out 
of bed.^^ 

By a little manoeuvring Franklin at 
the age of twenty-three (1729) came into 
possession of a paper which Keimer, se- 
cretly informed of a similar intention on 
Franklin's part, had started, but which 
languished for about nine months on a 
subscription list of not more than ninety 
names. This paper was speedily turned 
into the famous Pennsylvania Gazette, and 
soon gave its publisher not only reputa- 
tion, but good returns, though Keimer 
in his announcement admitted that it 
did not so ^^ quadrate'' with his circum- 
stances as to enable him to go on with 
the venture. Meredith, Franklin's part- 
ner, had the failing common to printers 
in those days, and was no help. The in- 
ability of Meredith's father to come for- 
ward with a promised loan would have 



26 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 
thrown the already prosperous Gazette 
into difficulties, had it not been for the 
loyal offer of two Junto friends, Coleman 
and Grace. Easy terms were made with 
Meredith to withdraw, and the partner- 
ship was dissolved in July, 1730. 

The previous year Franklin wrote and 
published A Modest Enquiry into the Nature 
and Necessity of a Pamper- Currency, which 
was a powerful stimulant to the cause 
of paper money, then popular, though 
^^the rich men disliked it." More cur- 
rency was issued, and Franklin was given 
the job of printing it, — ^^a very profit- 
able jobb,'' as he says, and not put down 
as one of his errata. In ten years the 
volume of paper had increased from 
£15,000 to £80,000, and gave much 
temporary prosperity, though Franklin 
later admitted that ^^ there are limits 
beyond which the quantity may be 
hurtful.'^ 

Business was now rushing with the 
young printer-editor. He added a 



BENJAMm FRANKLIN 27 
stationer's shop^ and began to pay his 
debts. He studied frugality as a science, 
and gave attention to personal appear- 
ance. Ostentatiously, be would some- 
times wheel his paper stock home on a 
barrow a la honest tradesman, for even 
a great man may be a prig. Franklin 
never went ^ ' a fishing or shooting, ' ^ and 
only read books because the doing so was 
^'seldom, snug and gave no scandal. '^ 
No wonder he grew prosperous! Mean- 
while Keimer and his luckless successor, 
Harry, failed and went to the Barba- 
does, leaving Bradford as Franklin's 
sole competitor in Philadelphia. 

The wife of Godfrey, the glazier, at 
whose house Franklin was then living, 
thought the rising young man would 
make a fit mate for the daughter of a 
relation. Franklin was not coy or ill- 
disposed to the match, but, the settlement 
being less than would suffice to pay his 
printing-house debts, he calmly suggested 
that the parents of the girl mortgage 



28 BEKJAMIN FEANKLIN 
their house to make up the sum! This 
affair fell through, but left him favour- 
ably inclined to the wedded state. In- 
timacy began again with the Eead 
family, and he was married to Deborah 
on September 1, 1730. Franklin, if 
shrewd, was venturesome, and this 
marriage, postponed by his own none too 
scrupulous neglect, was in keeping with 
his willingness to run a fair risk for a 
good bargain. There was no certainty 
in regard to the supposed death of Miss 
Eead's first husband, and this may have 
been thought by Franklin to be an offset 
to the wretched irregularities in which 
he admits that he had been engaged 
just before his taking a wife. Such 
follies were the commonplace wanderings 
of unrestrained youth, and his discerning 
mind, if not the loftiness of his ideals, 
soon taught him the essential vulgarity 
of promiscuous unchastity. Balancing 
then the possible illegality of the mar- 
riage against his own rather timorous 



BEN^JAMIK FRANKLm 29 
wantonness, the couple took their 
chances, and the venture prospered. 

With this important event ends that 
part of the Autobiography begun in 
1771, while Franklin, then agent of the 
colonies, was staying in England with his 
friend, Bishop Shipley. Not until he 
was at Passy, in 1784, as minister to 
France, did he again take up the narra- 
tive. 



YI. 

He was particularly urged to this 
second effort to complete his masterpiece 
by his friend Benjamin Yaughan, who 
wanted to see Franklin's career placed 
in comparison ^' with the lives of various 
public cut-throats and intriguers, and 
with absurd monastic self-tormentors or 
vain literary triflers.'' The sincere 
wishes of a friend prevailed on the old 
man's feelings, and he begins again by 
rehearsing with commendable pride his 
share in starting what proved to be in 
effect, if not in name, the first public 
library in this country. 

Books and bookshops in 1730 were few 
in the towns of Philadelphia and l^ew 
York. There was intellectual life in 
Boston, then the chief town of the colo- 
nies, but certainly no irradiating literary 
influence. The base of mental supplies 
was London, and London was a long way 
off. About fifty subscribers of forty shill - 



be:n^jamik feai^klik 31 

ings each down, and ten shillings a year 
thereafter, were found willing to start 
the scheme of a subscription library. 
In this project, as in everything else, 
Franklin showed his incomparable good 
sense by putting himself behind the 
vague shelter of a '^number of friends/^ 
who had urged him to start the scheme. 
Most of the subscribers were young 
tradesmen, naturally jealous of any one 
who showed himself forthputting. Thus 
early Franklin learned that the hidden 
is the stronger power, and that only 
small men ^^ claim" merit for deeds 
performed. 

He began, he tells us, to thrive won- 
derfully In his business and in his 
general life. His wife was no laggard 
herself, and helped her husband in ways 
not commonly thought possible or de- 
sirable by less clever women. Yet it was 
thrifty Deborah who first introduced 
luxury into the household in the shape 
of a china bowl and a silver spoon. 



32 BEl^JAMIN FEANKLIN" 
This extravagance was, as a matter of 
course, intended for her honoured hus- 
band, who years later, when in London, 
used to send her all manner of fine 
things, rich patterns of cloths, and the 
latest thing from the London shops. The 
Franklins grew to love comfortable and 
ample living, but never with ostentation. 
He found it possible to live many years 
away from his ^^dear child," as he 
always called her in his letters, but he 
never forgot her or the fact that she was 
a woman with tastes and fancies. This 
loyalty to each other was of a varying 
character, but the existence of it cannot 
be doubted. He pays full tribute to her 
worth in the Autobiography. 

Concrete expression of American hu- 
mour definitely began in the year 1732, 
when the first issue of Poo)^ Bichard^s Al- 
manac appeared. There was already the 
spoken word of Yankee wit, Dutch 
phlegm, Pennsylvania shrewdness, and 
all the incipient and various particles 



benjami:n^ franklik 33 

of what even as early as the Eevolu- 
tion had begun to shape into a national 
way of looking at the minor tragedies 
and comedies of domestic and civil life 
in that quizzical, consciously shy, and 
self-deprecating way that the world 
calls American. In the cool, dry ichor of 
Franklin's veins ran all the potentialities 
of this God-given racial quality. For 
twenty- five years this Almanac, success- 
ful from the start, gave forth annually and 
abundantly the fertile humour of Eichard 
Saunders. Homely wisdom, good sense, 
jests, both broad and keen as the license 
of the times allowed, continued long to 
amuse and instruct the English Colonies 
of ]^orth America. In 1757 Franklin gar- 
nered the best of these proverbs and mots 
into a sort of logical continuity, first 
known as Father Abraham'' s Speech, but 
passed into universal knowledge under 
the name of The Way to Wealth, It may 
safely be said that it is the American 
classic par excellence, and shares with 



34 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 
Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom'' s Ca&m the honour 
of having passed by translation into more 
other tongues than anything else thus far 
bearing the stamp of our national si)irit. 
He was meanwhile making a success of 
his paper, introducing modern ideas into 
its columns and lifting journalism above 
the personalities and narrowness of a 
provincial press. He was as good a news- 
paper man in his day as Greeley in his. 
It is hard to think of Franklin as having 
at that time moments of leisure, yet he 
continued to wander a little afield by 
espousing the cause of a young Irish Pres- 
byterian preacher named Hemphill, and 
even wrote a few controversial sermons 
for his friend. He also gave his scant 
spare hours to the study of languages, be- 
ginning with French, of which he soon 
made himself so much a master ^^as to be 
able to read the books with ease. ' ' Then 
he undertook Italian, pursuing this study 
along with chess, playing under an agree- 
ment with his fellow- i^layer, another 



BENJAMIE^ FEANKLIN 35 
student, that the victor in every game 
should impose a task in grammar or 
translation which the vanquished must 
perform upon honour before the next 
meeting. ^ ^ As we played pretty equally 
we thus beat one another into that lan- 
guage. '' 

He lost in the year 1736, of small-pox, 
Francis Folger Franklin, his only son 
born in wedlock. It was Franklin's re- 
gret that the child had not been inocu- 
lated, for it was not his way to neglect 
any method which pointed forward. His 
only other child born in lawful wedlock 
was his daughter Sarah, usually called 
Sally, born September 11, 1744. She 
married in 1767 Eichard Bache, of 
Philadelphia, and from her have de- 
scended all in whose veins runs legiti- 
mately the Benjamin Franklin blood. 
The same year that his little Frank died 
he was chosen to the lucrative position of 
clerk of the General Assembly. About 
this time he found opportunity to visit 



36 BE:ti[JAMIK FEANKLIN 
Boston, from which, he had been absent 
for ten years. Eeturning thence, he 
went to I^Tewport, where now lived his 
brother James, though in declining 
health. 

The now prospering young printer 
usually kept good company, and, if he 
could not always enjoy the society of 
superiors, took rather good care that his 
equals were of the right sort. But in 
the year 1737 he seems to have fallen 
into evil hands, and the short experi- 
ence did him no good. He was a Free- 
mason, and respected his relation with 
the Masonic body to the day of his 
death. He permitted himself, however, 
to take part, a very small part, in the 
mock initiation of a young apprentice 
who wished to join the order. The 
youth's master and others indulged in 
various forms of horse-play which event- 
ually led to the would-be novitiate's 
death. Franklin was not present at the 
tragic ceremonies, and in fact had even 



BEI^JAMIIS^ FRANKLIN 37 
withdrawn himself from participation in 
the indecencies practised on the witless 
youth. The whole affair was not in con- 
sonance with the general character of 
Franklin, who never showed, so far as 
his own words disclose, any fondness for 
practical jokes or other boisterous con- 
duct. It was an erratum which he 
passes by in his Autobiography un- 
noticed, but Bradford in the Mercury 
made the most of the incident. 

The same year of this untoward hap- 
pening, however, Franklin received the 
postmastership of which Bradford had 
been relieved for inefficiency, and par- 
ticularly for failures to make any returns 
whatever of his accounts to the general 
office for over five years. This position 
naturally tended to increase his already 
swelling good fortune, and he was able, 
by reason of the opportunity which suc- 
cess affords, to give himself more largely 
to the public welfare. His newspaper, 
thanks to the wider channel made for its 



38 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 
circulation through the post-of&ce, spread 
in influence and paid well, — so well, in 
fact, that the editor fell into a tempta- 
tion common to men of push and enter- 
prise. He wanted to start a magazine, 
and felt so pleased with the idea that, in 
spite of his wise adage about keeping 
secrets to one's self, he whispered the 
scheme. Another publisher was infected 
with the idea, and Franklin's The Gen- 
eral Magazine, which appeared on Febru- 
ary 16, 1741, was antedated by The 
American Magazine by just three days. 
Had Franklin held his tongue, — as he so 
often advised others to do, — he would 
have had the honour of publishing the 
first American specimen of i)eriodical 
literature. His rival, Andrew Bradford, 
gave up after issuing three numbers, but 
Franklin held out for six months, and 
then, after considerable loss, stopped his 
magazine, which was very creditable in 
appearance, though totally unlike the rest 
of Franklin's usual typographical work. 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 39 

Curiously, there was a later American 
Magazine published in Boston from 
1743 to 1746, in the imprint of which 
Franklin appears as the seller in Phila- 
delphia. It was a more imposing affair, 
and marked a step in advance of Frank- 
lin's modest venture, which, however, 
had a quiet distinction of its own with 
its ^ ' Ich dien ' ' plumes on the neat title- 
page and a generally trig look withal. 
If it was his first essay into side paths 
of publishing, it was also the last, and 
we must remember that he had not the 
whitened bones of other adventurers to 
deter him from this erratum, — one of 
which he says nothing in his Autobi- 
ography. One peculiarity of this short- 
lived magazine was that it had and 
sought no subscriptions, but tried to de- 
pend on the merit of each issue for the 
favour of the public. 

With about fifteen brother printers, 
mostly young men, ^^ staked'' by him in 
five colonies as well as in Jamaica and 



40 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 

Antigua, from whom lie drew, as a rule, a 
third of the profits made by each 5 with a 
prosperous newspaper and a popular and 
also lucrative almanac; with the print- 
ing of the colony's paper money safe in 
his own hands, as well as the power which 
the postmastership necessarily conferred 
upon him, — it is no wonder that Ben- 
jamin Franklin waxed powerful, and 
that Mr. Smyth, his latest biographer, 
found in his career at this time a fore- 
cast of the merger, or trust, of to-day. 
He did not, however, grow ostentatious 
in proportion to his growing wealth and 
power, but tried faithfully to live up to 
the thrifty inculcations of his own Poor 
Eichard. 

By 1748, when only forty-two years 
old, he began to dream, like a Euro- 
pean, of preparing for old age and its 
well-established comforts. David Hall, 
a Scotchman, recommended to him by 
AYilliam Strahan, his English printer- 
friend, had for several years been his 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 41 
active and capable partner. Having 
put his printing-house under the care of 
this partner and having absolutely left 
off bookselling and removed to a quieter 
part of the town, Franklin now hoped to 
be quite master of his own time, — '^no 
longer, as the song has it, at every one's 
call but my own. ' ' Cherishing the same 
hope, he had refused engaging further in 
public affairs. ^^Thus you see,'' he 
wrote his friend Golden, ^^I am in a fair 
way of having no other tasks but such as 
I shall like to give myself, and of enjoy- 
ing what I look upon as a great happi- 
ness, leisure to read, study, make experi- 
ments, and converse at large with such 
ingenious and worthy men as are pleased 
to honour me with their friendship or 
acquaintance, on such points as may 
produce something for the common ben- 
efit of mankind, uninterrupted by the 
little cares and fatigues of business." 
Could there have been a greater delu- 
sion than this pretty programme? 



YII. 

Franklin does not label all his wan- 
derings ^ ^errata,'' but is so frank about 
stating them that it may well be doubted 
whether he knew his moral bearings at 
times. When he was chosen clerk of 
the General Assembly of Pennsylvania 
(1736), he soon saw that the position was 
not only a good one in itself, but that it 
enabled him to ^^work" the members to 
get legislative printing into his own 
hands. This and ^^ other occasional 
jobbs^' were clear instances of '^ graft" 
in its primitive sense, where a man se- 
cures an extraordinary advantage or 
profit, aside from his salary, by reason 
of holding a certain office. But these 
were the days of the Walpole administra- 
tion in the mother- country, and a young 
printer, with his fortune still to make, 
had no loud call to be sensitive in such 
matters when English statesmen were 
setting the worst possible example. It 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 43 

is wholly probable that to the insensitive 
Franklin ^^jobbs'' of this sort were the 
properest way in the world of getting 
ahead. The next year he stepped into 
the deputy postmaster-generalship in 
Philadelphia only to find that his news- 
paper grew apace when his own hands 
ran the machinery by which he could 
distribute it more readily and receive 
more advertisements and correspondence 
from a wider field. Instead of revenging 
himself on Bradford who had found ways, 
when he was in of&ce, to hinder the 
course of Franklin's paper through the 
mails, he adopted no cheap methods to 
injure his old rival. 

The associations of young men in this 
country for self-betterment have, since 
early colonial days, in many cases, per- 
haps in most cases, frequently found 
themselves drifting into the absorbing 
life of local politics. They w^ere potent 
just before the Ee volution, and even in 
anti-slavery days found ready opportu- 



44 BEl^JAMIN FEANKLIN 
nity to depart from their original pur- 
poses. Some of them had an influence 
which in these more critical times would 
be considered baneful. In a cruder 
period their reaching out into a wider 
field was normal and, in the main, desir- 
able. The Junto, for which Franklin 
kept his affection as long as he lived, 
was no exception to the general trend of 
such organisations. As a rising man 
and an influential member of this club, 
and also as an of&ce-holder, the editor- 
printer turned his attention to what we 
should now call civic betterment. The 
tip-staff in all ages has been something 
of a mauvais sujet, and so Franklin, see- 
ing the demoralised condition of the 
city watch, unfolded his plans for one 
more means of raising taxes to support 
a constabulary. Soon this reform 
went through. Next he brought about 
an interest in better protection against 
fire, and writing in 1784, when he was 
an old man, he had the satisfaction of 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIK 45 
saying that lie and one other still sur- 
vived the other original members of the 
Union Fire Company, set on its feet in 
1736, by the agency of which Philadel- 
phia was so well equipped that he 
doubted whether there was ^^a city in 
the world better provided with the 
means of putting a stop to beginning 
conflagrations." In both these excel- 
lent reforms the Junto took the leading 
part, but Franklin was the master 
spirit. Another wholesome project 
started by him was the proper cleaning 
of streets, not only in Philadelphia, but 
later in London. He certainly was 
profiting by the exhortations of his boy- 
ish Dogood Papers in his brother's New- 
England Courant 

At the same time with his efforts 
toward civic betterment he was advanc- 
ing reforms in the province. While, as 
he wrote in the Autobiography, he had 
^'on the whole abundant reason to be 
satisfied with" his '^ being established 



46 BEKJAMi:sr FEANKLIK 

in Pennsylvania/' there were two things 
he regretted, ^' there being no provision 
for defence nor for a compleat education 
of youth: no militia, no college. '^ To 
meet the latter defect, he drew up his 
' Proposal for Establishing an Academy, ' ' 
in 1743, from which ultimately came 
the ^ ^Academy and Charitable School 
of the Province of Pennsylvania,'' the 
nucleus of the noble University of Penn- 
sylvania. The former deficiency was 
overcome through his publication in 
1747 of his pamphlet Flain Truth, written 
to promote a voluntary association of 
the people for the defence of the province 
against possible encroachments of the 
Spanish and the French, the long-con- 
tinued endeavours of the governor to pre- 
vail with the Quaker Assembly to pass 
a militia law and make other provisions 
for defence having proved abortive. 
Through his spirited leadership the vol- 
untary association organised into com- 
panies and regiments, and he supplied 



BEI^JAMIN FEANKLIN 47 
devices and mottoes which were painted 
on silk flags provided the companies by 
the patriotic women of Philadelphia. 
The building of a battery below the 
town, with means furnished by a lottery, 
was also stimulated by him. 

Meanwhile he was serenely pursu- 
ing his experiments and philosophical 
studies. He had already invented the 
Franklin stove, the Pennsylvania fire- 
place, as he termed it, and declined a 
patent for it upon the high principle 
^^that as we enjoy great advantages from 
the inventions of others we should be 
glad of an opportunity to serve others 
by any invention of ours 5 and this we 
should do freely and generously.^' The 
next year, 1744, he laid the foundations 
for the American Philosophical Society 
'^for promoting useful knowledge among 
the British Plantations of America,'' and 
for corresponding with the learned socie- 
ties of Europe; and in 1746 he had begun 
his electrical experiments, in which his 



48 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 
advance was so rapid that in a very few 
years lie had proved the ^^ sameness" of 
lightning with electricity, had made his 
famous demonstration with the kite, had 
invented the lightning rod, and had been 
elected to the Eoyal Society upon his 
merits as a scientist. 

By 1752 he was again in active public 
service, busied in many affairs. He was 
made an alderman of the city, and was 
elected to the General Assembly. He 
tried a little the of&ce of j ustice of the 
peace by attending a few courts and sit- 
ting on the bench to hear causes; but, 
finding that he did not possess a sufficient 
knowledge of the common law ^^to act 
in that station with credit," he wisely 
withdrew from it. Upon taking his 
seat in the General Assembly, election 
to which was repeated annually for ten 
years, '^without my ever asking any 
elector for his vote, or signifying directly 
or indirectly any desire of being chosen," 
he so worked his influence as to turn 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 49 

over the lucrative clerkship to his son 
William, born out of wedlock and taken 
magnanimously into the new household 
by Mrs. Franklin on her marriage. 
The next year he was appointed one of 
the commissioners to confer with the 
Indians of Carlisle, the result of which 
was a satisfactory treaty, and in course 
of time his pamphlet, BemarTcs Concern- 
ing the Savages of North America, The 
same year came his appointment, jointly 
with William Hunter, as Postmaster- 
General of America by a commission 
from the Postmaster- General in England. 
The business of the office then occasioned 
his taking a journey to New England, 
and while he was there Harvard gave 
him the degree of Master of Arts, with 
which Yale had already honoured him, 
in consideration of his electrical discov- 
eries. The following year (1754), when 
war with France was again threatening, 
he went to Albany as a representative 
from Pennsylvania to the congress of 



50 benjami:n^ feanklin 

commissioners from the several colonies 
to confer with the chiefe of the Six Na- 
tions concerning means for mutual de- 
fence. On this occasion he projected 
and drew his famous plan for the union 
of the colonies under one government, 
known as the ^^Plan of Union/' which 
failed of adoption, the colonial assem- 
blies objecting because *^ there was too 
much prerogative in it,'' while ^^in Eng- 
land it was judg'd to have too much of 
the democratic." 

The next year he is found aiding 
General Braddock at Fredericktown, in 
stress for facilities to transport his stores 
and military baggage, by the establish- 
ment of a system of teams and pack- 
horses, with such success and prompti- 
tude that in less than two weeks ^^one 
hundred and fifty waggons with two 
hundred and fifty- nine carrying horses 
were on their march for the camp," 
while Braddock' s men, after scouring the 
country roundabout, had been unable to 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 51 

collect more than twenty-five teams, and 
not all of them in serviceable condition. 
He further aided this unhappy general 
materially by arranging for the sending 
of supplies of provisions after him upon 
the march, advancing for the service 
a thousand pounds of his (Franklin's) 
own money. He rated Braddock as he 
stands in history : ^^The general was, 
I think, a brave man, and might prob- 
ably have made a figure as a good officer 
in some European war. But he had too 
much self-confidence, too high an opinion 
of the validity of regular troops, and 
too mean a one of both Americans and 
Indians.'^ 

After Braddock' s defeat his own mili- 
tary service began with his acceptance, 
in December, of the command of the 
troops to defend the frontier, and his 
departure with his son William as 
aide-de-camp. 



YIII. 

It was the punctiliousness of the Pro- 
prietary Government of Pennsylvania, 
through its representative, Governor 
Denny (who had brought back with 
him the gold Sir Godfrey Copley medal 
presented some time before by the Eoyal 
Society to Franklin), which occasioned 
the first sending of Franklin in an official 
capacity to England. The first month 
of 1756 had been spent by him in efficient 
military service on the frontier, in the 
last French and Indian war. He raised 
and disciplined troops, established block- 
houses, and erected Fort Allen on the 
site of the completely destroyed village 
of Gnadenhiitten. Content, apparently, 
with his share of glory, he had declined 
Governor Morris's promise to make him 
a general if he would move on Fort 
Duquesne, and his military honours rest 
on his title of Colonel of the Eegiment 
of Philadelphia, which he accepted 



BEKJAMIN FRANKLIN 53 

shortly after. Affairs were in so bad 
a condition, the losses by death and 
destruction of pro^Derty so great, that 
it was felt imperative to raise funds to 
protect the i^rovince. The budget con- 
sented to by the Assembly fell under 
that estimated by the governor, who 
threw it out. It was time to present 
matters before a more effective authority 
than the protector of the interests of the 
Penns, and accordingly, in February, 
1757, Franklin was appointed agent of 
tlie province ^^to solicit and transact 
the affairs thereof in Great Britain. '^ 
The issue was the right of taxing the 
proprietary estate in common with the 
estates of the people. 

The Proprietaries seem to have been 
anxious to propitiate Franklin through 
Denny, who, inspired by too much 
madeira and a certain natural stupidity, 
tried to offer ^^inducements'' to the 
most astute man in Pennsylvania. 
Franklin always knew on which side his 



54 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 
bread was buttered, and lie also knew 
the simple elements of right and wrong. 
Therefore, he would have none of this 
blundering effort at bribery, and ad- 
hered to the popular side. On the 
failure of the governor, who seems to 
have maintained agreeable personal 
relations with the unruly commoner, the 
Assembly determined to resist the ob- 
structive policy of the Proprietaries by 
thus sending Franklin to England. 

Then appeared Lord Loudon, who 
managed to patch up some sort of 
armistice before Franklin sailed, and 
then decided to sail on the packet with 
Franklin, to join the fleet headed for 
Louisburg. If ever a man deserved the 
titular distinction of ^^Cunctator," 
Loudon is that man. Franklin arrived 
in New York about the first of April, 
his ^^ sea-stores" already gone ahead of 
him, and June had nearly passed before 
he sailed, owing to Loudon's delays and 
indecisions. The governor's messenger, 



bekjami:n^ feanklin 55 

Innis, said of this Fabian worthy that he 
was ^^like St. George on the signs, al- 
ways on horseback and never rides on. ' ' 
Finally, after breaking away from 
Loudon, who did not go to Louisburg 
after all, Franklin arrived in London 
late in July, 1757. 

He was sought at once by distinguished 
men of science and was honoured in vari- 
ous ways, but, true to his early calling, 
he looked up his printing associates of 
thirty years before and ^^set up^' the 
beer, the drinking of which he had 
sedulously tried to stop or diminish 
when he was a London printer bent 
on improving the world after his own 
standards. 

Soon after his arrival a meeting was 
arranged, through Dr. John Fothergill, 
with the Proprietaries at the house of 
Thomas Penn in Spring Garden. They 
were represented by Mr. Paris as 
counsel, a ^^ proud, angry man,^' with 
whom Franklin soon refused to parley. 



56 BENJAMi:Nr FEANKLIN 

Franklin's minutes of complaints were 
then put into the hands of the attorney 
and solicitor-general for their opinion. 
A year went by, and no answer to 
Franklin was forthcoming. A message 
was finally sent direct to the Assembly, 
in no way meeting Franklin's complaints, 
but stating that some terms could be 
arrived at if the Assembly ^^ would send 
out some person of candour." The 
message was not answered because Denny 
agreed to an act taxing the proprietary 
estate. The objection of the Proprie- 
taries naturally followed, but the act was 
sustained in the main, because Lord 
Mansfield accepted the assurance of 
Franklin that no inj ury would accrue to 
the proprietary estate in case the act 
were executed. Thus his first great 
venture into the field of high negotia- 
tions was a success. 

There is no pleasanter episode in 
Franklin's life than his experiences, 
first begun on this mission, at 'No. 7 



BENJAMIK FEANKLIK 57 
Craven Street, Strand, where lie lived 
in great comfort in the lodgings of 
Mrs. Margaret Stevenson, with whom 
and her daughter Mary his friendship 
lasted for many years. 



IX. 

Although this first mission was 
brought to a close in the summer of 1760, 
Franklin remained in England two years 
longer. While the slow- moving negotia- 
tions were under way, he had employed 
his ample leisure in further electrical 
experiments, scientific studies, and philo- 
sophical speculations 5 had enjoyed his 
association with men of learning j had 
travelled about England and also into 
Scotland, where he spent six weeks of 
the ^ ^ densest happiness ' ' he had ^ ^ met 
with in any part of his life; had visited 
the home of his ancestors; had written 
more essays and skits; had carried on a 
voluminous correspondence; and had in 
1759 received the degree of Doctor of 
Laws from the University of St. Andrews 
at Edinburgh, to be followed three years 
later by the honorary doctorate of civil 
law from the University of Oxford. 

With his mission off his hands, the re- 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 59 
maining two years were largely given to 
his advocacy of the retention of Canada 
and its annexation to the British empire, 
an end which was directly inflnenced by 
his contributions to the public press and 
the publication of the vigorous anony- 
mous pamphlet, The Interest of Great 
Britain Considered^ With Regard to her 
Colonies, And the Acquisition of Canada 
and Guadaloupe, now known to have been 
written by him with the aid of his asso- 
ciate, Eichard Jackson. 

In the summer of 1761 he made the 
tour of the Low Countries, returning to 
London in season to witness the coro- 
nation of George III. in September; and 
the next summer he sailed for home, 
after having had '^a most agreeable 
time of it in Europe. '' He had added 
to his circle numerous valued friends, 
had contracted rare new friendships, and 
had been flattered with much notice by 
persons of distinction. It was shortly 
before his departure that David Hume 



60 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 
wrote him, '■ '■ America has sent us many 
good things, gold, silver, sugar, tobacco, 
indigo &c. ; but you are the first philoso- 
pher, and indeed the first great man of 
letters for whom we are beholden to her. ' ' 
The return voyage, too, contributed to 
his entertainment. He sailed in late 
August in company with ten merchant- 
ships under a convoy of a man-of-war, 
and the weather was so favourable that 
^^ there were few days in which we could 
not visit from ship to ship, dining with 
each other and on board the man-of-war: 
which made the time pass agreeably, 
much more so than when one goes in a 
single ship, for this was like travelling 
in a moving village with all one's neigh- 
boui'S about one. ' ' 

He reached Philadelphia on the first 
of November, and arrived '^safe and well 
at my own door." He found his wife 
and daughter in good health, ^Hhe latter 
grown quite a woman, with many amiable 
accomplishments" acquired in his ab- 



BE:N^JAMm FEANKLIN 61 

sence of nearly six years; and Ms friends 
^^as hearty and affectionate as ever, with 
whom my house was filled for many days 
to congratulate me on my return." 

He was soon again immersed in public 
affairs. Upon his reappearance in the 
Assembly he was voted three tliousand 
pounds sterling for his services in Eng- 
land and '^ their thanks delivered by the 
Speaker. ^ ' In the following spring, 1763, 
he set out on a tour of the northern col- 
onies to inspect and regulate their post- 
of&ces, and in this journey spent the 
I summer, travelling some sixteen hundred 
I miles. Through the following winter, 
j during which the Assembly sat, ^^busi- 
\ ness publick and private," he wrote, 
I ^'devours all my time." Besides his 
duty as an assemblyman, he had another 
trust to execute, that ^^of being one of 
the commissioners appointed by law to 
dispose of the public money appropri- 
ated to the raising and paying of an army 
to act against the Indians and defend the 



62 BENJAMIK FRANKLIN 

frontiers." Meanwhile arose the two 
insurrections in December of the ' ' back 
inhabitants" of the province, — chiefly 
Scotch- Irish frontiersmen who conceived 
the idea that the Quaker Assembly 
would fail to provide adequate defences. 
Twenty poor Indians, who had from the 
first settlement of the province lived in 
peace under the protection of the gov- 
ernment, were barbarously massacred. 
This roused Franklin's indignation and 
gave him ^'a good deal of employment," 
for the rioters threatened further mis- 
chief and their actions were seemingly 
approved by an increasing party. To 
strengthen the hands of the weak govern- 
ment by rendering the rioters' acts un- 
popular and odious, he issued his fiery 
pamphlet, A Narrative of the late Mas- 
sacreSj in Lancaster County , of a Number of 
Indians^ Friends of this Province, by Per- 
sons Unhioicn. It had the effect intended, 
and afterward, when a body of the rioters 
marched toward the capital in de- 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 63 
fiance of the government, with the 
avowed intent of killing one hundred 
and forty Indian converts under its 
protection, he found little difficulty in 
promptly forming, at the governor's re- 
quest, an association of a thousand men 
with arms for the defence of the govern- 
ment and the Indians. In this crisis the 
governor, now John Penn, made Frank- 
lin's house for some time his headquar- 
ters, and did everything by his advice, 
^^so that for about forty-eight hours I 
was a very great man." The fighting 
face that the defenders put on, and the 
reasonings they used with the insurgents, 
— Franklin was sent out with three others 
to ^^meet and discourse them,'' — turned 
them back and restoied quiet to the 
city. Then he ^^ became a less man 
than ever," for by his pamphlet and 
these transactions he made himself many 
enemies among the populace, and, seeing 
in this an opportunity long desired by the 
proprietary interests for his overthrow. 



64 BENJAMII^ FRAm^LII^ 

the governor, despite tlie services Frank- 
lin liad just rendered, joined the whole 
weight of this interest to get him out of 
the Assembly. At the next election, ac- 
cordingly, a majority of '^ about twenty- 
five in four thousand " managed to de- 
feat the now undesirable candidate. 
There was a lively time in old Phila- 
delphia on voting day, and things were 
done according to the most approved 
modern methods to defeat the illustrious 
commoner. 



Close upon his defeat as candidate 
for membership to the Assembly came 
his election by a vote of nineteen to 
eleven in that body to present to the 
king the petition, as aid to Eichard 
Jackson, the provincial agent of Penn- 
sylvania, which should perchance hasten 
a royal instead of a proprietary govern- 
ment. John Dickinson, one of those 
virtuous men of great ability whose 
genius leads them unerringly a few 
points off the true course, fought against 
this appointment of ^^ the man most ob- 
noxious to his country' ' j but in spite of 
this alleged public odium Benjamin 
I Franklin, who replied to these and other 
aspersions with an exasperating and well- 
calculated moderation, was accompanied, 
entirely to his own surprise, by an escort 
of three hundred fellow- citizens on horse 
to his ship sixteen miles down the river. 
He arrived at London on December 10, 



66 BENJAMII^ FEANKLIN 
1764, and again found lodging with Mrs. 
Stevenson, the mother of Mary Steven- 
son, later the wife of Dr. Hewson. For- 
getting, if one can, the apparent ease 
with which he reconciled himself to a 
separation for ten years from home, wife, 
and kindred, there is no pleasanter epi- 
sode to recall in Franklin^ s career than 
his relation with these kind people. His 
letters reveal a most affectionate good- 
will on both sides, and abound in many 
playful allusions to the complete hold 
which the great man had on the Steven- 
son household. He always fitted easily 
into any situation. Whether at the 
court of France or as a lodger in a 
London boarding-house, he was wholly 
himself, unaffected by grandeur and un- 
disturbed by simplicity. 

The few months which he thought 
would end his business of the petition 
soon slipped away, and nothing was 
gained. Meanwhile he had joined with 
other colonial agents in unsuccessful 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 67 
efforts against the famous Stamp Act 
which George Grenville ^ succeeded in 
passing through both Houses of Parlia- 
ment in March, 1765. Franklin's philo- 
sophic temperament rose superior to 
moral and patriotic enthusiasm. On the 
field of action he was impressed by the 
futility of opposition and by that con- 
centrated force which England has al- 
ways been able to present when its mind 
is made up on any course. Feeling as he 
did, it was natural that Franklin, in 
whom the statesman was as yet subordi- 
nate to the philosopher, should look for 
the wisest way out of a difficulty which 
he believed to be unavoidable, and that 
he should lend himself to Grenville' s 
pretty scheme of selecting ' ^ discreet and 
reputable" stamp distributors from the 
colonists themselves by naming John 
Hughes, a personal friend of his in 
Philadelphia, as one of these distribu- 
tors. Had Franklin then been making 
the world his confessor, he might well 



68 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 
have put this step down as an erratum. 
Not one, probably, of the gallant horse 
who saw him. depart for England could 
now have been found to welcome him 
home. His very friends and even his 
family were in danger of the popular 
hatred. Of all who aided or seemed to 
aid the enforcement of the odious Act, 
Mrs. Franklin alone seems, Aj ax-like, to 
have defied danger. 

But Franklin was then too old, as he 
was always too wise, a man to care over- 
much for surface agitations. If he missed 
the point on this matter, it was because 
he was on the wrong side of the Atlantic. 
Moderate, peaceful by nature, the one 
American who had a universal reputa- 
tion which had to be respected, if it was 
not liked, he kept his own counsel and 
felt his way carefully. To Grenville 
succeeded the ineffectual Eockingham 
cabinet, and within a year the potent 
antagonism of Pitt was felt against the 
absurdity of taxing unrepresented sub- 



BEIS^JAMIK FEANKLIN 69 

jects. Eight or wrong as Pitt's appeal 
may have sounded to English con- 
sciences, the non-importation agree- 
ments, by which the colonies were learn- 
ing to do without the manufactures of 
the mother- country and finding out in a 
measure their own domestic resources, 
were touching the English pocket, and 
that is a matter of life or death, not of 
ethics. Lacking one month of a year 
from the passage of the Act, Benjamin 
Franklin gave testimony as to its expedi- 
ency. l!^ot only was he equipped, as 
every witness should be, to stand the 
searching examination to which he with 
others was subjected, but he was abso- 
lutely master of the situation. It was 
another instance of the extraordinary 
opportunity which a provincial of su- 
preme ability has sometimes to prove 
himself the compeer of the administra- 
tion of a central government. ^^^N^o, 
they will never submit to it," was his 
laconic but not impetuous answer to an 



70 BENJAMTO FEANKLIN 
obvious question. And then the culmi- 
nating assertion that ''■ the Parliament of 
Great Britain has not, never had, and of 
right never can have, without consent 
given either before or after, power to 
make laws of sufficient force to bind the 
subjects of America in any case whatso- 
ever, and particularly in taxation.'' 

It would be ridiculous to say that 
Franklin posed on this his first of 
several notable appearances in public. 
He must have realised, as a man of ex- 
traordinary discernment, that the situa- 
tion was dramatic, and that the sur- 
roundings lent themselves to make an 
effective picture. There is a certain 
staginess in any deliberative Assembly, 
and Parliament was no exception. Per- 
ceiving this, as doubtless he did, his 
unerring sense may have told him that 
entire simplicity and candour best became 
the situation : that these qualities were in- 
nate only made his attitude the stronger. 
A few weeks later the Stamp Act was 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 71 
definitely repealed, as much to the joy 
of British exporters as of the colonists. 
If Franklin's reputation had sagged a 
little within the year, it rose at once to 
dizzy heights. Success makes the spirits 
bright, and even Franklin's complacency 
responded to the change in his fortunes. 
Some of his cleverest writings appeared 
at this period. It was his keenest 
pleasure to ^^joUy" his friends and now 
and then the public. The admirable 
dulness of the British mind was an in- 
viting target for some of his sharpest 
barbs. Never malicious, he felt sure that 
his wit would not severely wound, and 
that there was a good chance that he 
would not be understood. It was hard 
for the English to comprehend the re- 
sources of America, when the colonists 
began to do without manufactures. Ac- 
cordingly, Franklin informs his British 
readers that colonial sheep were so 
blessed by nature that each ^^has a 
little car or wagon on four little wheels" 



72 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 
to keep its wool from dragging on the 
ground. In tlie same skit he tells of the 
plans in operation for a cod and whale 
fishery in the '^Tipper Lakes/' where 
the cod fly for safety from their huge 
foe. ^'The grand leap of the whale in 
the chase up the Falls of Niagara is es- 
teemed by all who have seen it as one of 
the finest spectacles in nature." His 
Rules for Beducing a Great Empire to a 
Small One even Swift might have been 
glad to father, though it was lacking in 
the great satirist's intensive scorn. 

Thus writing to please himself and 
perhaps others, unusually honoured in 
England and in France, and intrusted 
now with the agencies of New Jersey, 
Georgia, and Massachusetts, the next few 
years passed on still finding Franklin in 
what seemed the home of his adoption. 
He speaks hopefully in his letters of 
returning home, but still he lingers, till 
at last he does not pretend even to himself 
that he is on the eve of departure. 



BENJAMIK FEANKLIN 73 
If Benjamin Franklin was devotedly 
attached to the land of his birth, he was 
also true to the country which seemed at 
that time to have adopted him. ^NTo im- 
portant word of Franklin exists which 
tends to show that he cherished the idea 
of separation so long as cohesion was a 
possibility. Shelburne's ministry could 
not have been displeasing to him, for it 
was the creation of the friendly Pitt, 
and there is no telling what in the way 
of reconciliation might have come to 
pass, had it not been for Charles Towns- 
hend, Shelburne's chancellor of the ex- 
chequer. Townshend was cursed by the 
audacity of brilliant parts, which is 
even farther from the condition of su- 
preme ability than is an honourable and 
commendable stupidity. His galloping 
career was cut short by death in the fall 
of 1767, and three months later Lord 
Hillsborough succeeded Shelburne as 
secretary of state for America. Frank- 
lin had a marvellous capacity for ^^get- 



74 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 
ting along'' with men, but lie had a 
latent impatience for routiuists and dry- 
asdusts. Hillsborough was not to his 
liking, and he showed it. As a result, 
the new secretary, piqued by Franklin's 
acid retorts, refused to recognise the 
American as agent for Massachusetts, 
though he had been appointed by a 
vote of the House of Representatives of 
that province. Shortly after Franklin 
had the pleasure of causing the resigna- 
tion of Hillsborough, who in the Board 
of Trade opposed him and others in the 
matter of the Walpole Grant (the grant 
of a tract of land on the Ohio Eiver to 
a company of which Thomas Walpole, 
a London banker, was president). To 
Hillsborough's inadequate objections, 
which read absurdly to-day and may 
have read so then, Franklin in turn i)re- 
sented a reply to the Privy Council, 
who voted down the noble lord, whom 
Lord Dartmouth succeeded in August, 
1773. Dartmouth was a good man, and 



BEI^JAMIN FEANKLIN 75 
not unfriendly to the now recognised 
Massachusetts agent, but the exigencies 
of politics are severe. In a few months 
occurred one of those dramatic events 
which make Franklin^ s career appear so 
vivid, — the famous episode which in- 
flicted great damage on Franklin^ s im- 
mediate reputation and peace of mind, 
but which involved him inextricably on 
the American side, while he was yet 
sanely and moderately trying to play the 
part of reconciler. 

The story of the ^^ Hutchinson Let- 
ters,'^ like many another event of his- 
tory, is none the worse for an air of mys- 
tery which even now surrounds it. The 
fate of empires did not hang on its issue, 
but there were some uncomfortable mo- 
ments for Benjamin Franklin before the 
tale was finally told. Here it must be 
rehearsed with the greatest brevity. 

It was common opinion that the Eng- 
lish government acted wholly on its own 
knowledge and prejudice in its stern and 



76 BENJAMIN FRANKLm 
irritating attitude toward the colonies, 
and in particular toward the town of 
Boston. Franklin held this opinion^ and 
expressed it freely. An Englishman, 
whose name is still unknown, told him 
that such severities resulted from infor- 
mation and advice proffered by certain 
Americans, and corroborated his asser- 
tion by placing in Franklin's hands a 
batch of indisputably authentic letters 
written by Governor Thomas Hutch- 
inson, Lieutenant-Governor Andrew 
Oliver, and three others, every one of 
them native-born residents of Massachu- 
setts Bay. To-day we may think of 
these gentlemen — for gentlemen they 
surely were — as Eoyalists, Loyalists, To- 
ries, Traitors, anything we please to con- 
sider them ; but in their own times they 
were flesh of our flesh, and not thought 
of as aliens, unpopular as they may have 
been. What these colonial bureaucrats 
wrote ^^home'^ about the doings of the 
rebellious people whom they governed 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 77 
was calculated to affect the people of 
Boston then very much as the pamphlet- 
eering work of Anti-imperialists in the 
same town in modern days affected the 
American spirit in the West. It was just 
j simple treason. Franklin hoped or — 
, shall we dare to say? — pretended to hope 
that the violent feeling of the colonists 
against England would be modified, 
j could they realise that the mother-coun- 
I try had acted on the advice of some of 
j their own leaders. Accordingly, under 
( a strict injunction that the letters should 
, not he printed or have a public circula- 
j tion, he gained permission to send them 
( to Massachusetts. They reached the 
I hands of Thomas Gushing^ then speaker 
I of the House of Eepresentatives. In 
k some fashion, dishonourable, but explica- 
I ble in those heated times, they found too 
speedy a publicity, and were ordered to 
j be printed by the Assembly in express 
j violation of Franklin's injunction. The 
letters created all the excitement to be 



78 BENJAMIK FEANKLIN 
expected^ but not a whit of that abate- 
ment of hostility to England for which 
Franklin had looked ; only a rage against 
the respectable writers, who in turn were 
angry enough that the privacy of their 
correspondence was thus violated. 

Franklin as transmitter of the letters 
was still undiscovered, but it was an easy 
matter in England to learn that the ad- 
dressee was William Whately, once pri- 
vate secretary of Grenville. "Whately 
was dead, and his papers had been vio- 
lated. Who did it ? Thomas Whately, 
executor of his brother's estate, and 
John Temple were suspected. ^^Jack'^ 
Temple, Governor Bowdoin's son-in-law, 
was something of a blade and hot-headed. 
He demanded that Thomas Whately 
should assert positively that he, Temple, 
had never misused his brother's letters, 
to which he admitted he had had re- 
course. This Whately was unable to do, 
and, therefore, the two men, once friends, 
fought with pistols. Their blood was 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 79 
up and was Saxon^ not Gallic. Conse- 
quently, they failed to see the lighter 
side of such an encounter, which was not 
without its amenities, though Whately 
was badly wounded. At this point, 
hoping to stay further bloodshed, Frank- 
lin on December 23, 1773, admitted 
over his own signature in the press that 
it was he, as the Massachusetts agent, 
who obtained and sent the letters to 
Boston. He completely exonerated both 
Whately and Temple from the least 
complicity in the affair. In August 
Franklin had placed before Lord Dart- 
mouth the petition to the king from the 
Massachusetts House, praying the removal 
of Hutchinson and Oliver, but had heard 
nothing of it. If Franklin in this matter 
was not representative of the conscience of 
the colonists, he certainly embodied their 
audacity and spirit of resistance, or what 
we should now call their ^^ nerve.'' 

Here was a chance to put his courage 
to a test, and he was accordingly sum- 



80 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

moned early in January, 1774, to appear 
before the Committee for Plantation 
Affairs. On that occasion he presented 
to the committee the petition, with 
copies of the papers in the case, and 
asked for an adjournment, that he might 
secure counsel. On January 29 hear- 
ing was reopened in the Committee 
Room of the Privy Council, known as 
the Cockpit. His counsel, John Dunning 
and John Lee, proved ineffective, and 
Franklin was forced to bear alone the 
terrific assault of Alexander Wedder- 
burn, afterward Lord Loughborough, 
counsel for Hutchinson and Oliver. 
Invective and personal abuse were car- 
ried to their highest point by Wedder- 
burn, and these Franklin bore with 
consummate dignity. He would not, 
however, reveal the means by which he 
gained possession of the papers. Repine 
as we may over the question of political 
ethics, it is nevertheless true that in 
statesmanship and diplomacy a man 



be:n^jami:n^ feanklin si 

may side with his cause. It is possible 
to accuse Franklin of personal indeli- 
cacy in sending the famous letters to 
Massachusetts, hut in doing so he acted, 
precipitately, no doubt, as if he were rep- 
resenting the powers of a state in time 
of war to employ unusual means to un- 
cover the plans of the enemy. His 
refusal to betray a personal trust, by 
refusing to tell how he gained possession 
of these papers, was the offset to the 
other part of the transaction. But n othing 
could save him from speedy punishment. 
His years of mediation between the col- 
onies and the mother- country, the re- 
spect in which he had been so generally 
held in England, counted him nothing. 
The coarse abuse of Wedderburn, a 
man of mean repute, whose career was 
even then degenerating, expressed well 
enough a rising sentiment against the 
already disgraced colonial agent. Later 
he was dismissed from the postmaster- 
generalship of America. 



XL 

As often happens, when personal 
abuse is used instead of calm dissection 
of facts, the victim of such abuse is 
the gainer. Wedderburn thought, in 
that famous scene in the Cockpit, to 
destroy utterly the reputation and 
standing of the old colonial agent, but 
he went too far. Those in England who 
were true to Franklin became still more 
true. Many of them remained his friends 
during the Eevolution. 

His conciliatory sentiments are now 
rapidly disappearing. In a fortnight he 
writes to Thomas Gushing that he is at a 
loss to know how peace and union are to 
be maintained or restored between the 
different parts of the empire. Although 
he was able to say that he had ^^not lost 
a single friend on the occasion," he be- 
gan to turn his thoughts homeward. In 
the time remaining to him in England 
he showed no depression of spirits, but 



BEiij^jAMi:^^ fea:n^klin 83 

busied himself^ as usual, with all sorts 
of interests. He writes to Beccaria in 
Italy on the resistance of a vacuum to 
the passage of the electric fluid, and 
thinks that this discovery may ultimately 
give new light on the aurora borealis. 
To Condor cet he gives information, geo- 
logical and palseontological, regarding 
parts of North America. He dines with 
clergymen, litterateurs, scientific men, 
politicians, statesmen, with all who 
made the life of his day more vivid and 
helpful to him. There were homely 
gifts from home to share witli his friends 
and enjoy, perhaps first of all, himself. 
There were people to help by his advice, 
and undertakings of every sort to en- 
courage by his friendly aid. Nor did 
he scorn to turn his grave attention to 
the rendering of decayed meat sweet by 
placing it in fixed air. Even the de- 
fence of marriage with a deceased wife's 
sister was not too remote to engage his 
busy mind. These and other activities 



84 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 
served no doubt to soothe the irritating 
wound dealt him in the presence of his 
enemies. Certain it is that in the short 
year left he had little to say about heal- 
ing the breach between England and her 
American colonies. He was in effect an 
Englishman no longer; and, when he 
sailed for home on March 20, 1775, his 
allegiance, nominal and real, practically 
ceased. Still there did linger in Frank- 
lin's pacific disposition a wish to do all 
that he possibly could to preserve the 
integrity of an imperial system in 
which he continued to believe until 
the last. Had it not been for the 
^ ^blunderers,'' he foresaw a possible 
future in which ^^we might have gone 
on extending our Western Empire, 
adding Province to Province, as far as 
the South Sea." 

While aboard Captain Osborne's 
^^Pennsylvania Packet," bound home, 
Franklin addressed to his ^'dear son" — 
so soon to disappoint him bitterly by 



be:n^jami:n^ frai^klin 85 

turning Loyalist — a long account of the 
negotiations in London for effecting a 
reconciliation. This circumstantial and 
sometimes tiresome narrative gives all 
that it is necessary to know of Frank- 
lin's last efforts to hold to the old moor- 
ings the new American ship of state, 
now straining to be free. His confer- 
ences with the Honourable Mrs. and Lord 
Howe and with the great Chatham are 
carefully set forth, but, since they all 
came to nothing, have left a less deep 
impression than many others of Frank- 
lin's writings. Fine company never 
^^feazed" the easy-going colonial. 
Going to keep one of his appointments 
with Chatham, he was so absorbed in 
a new pamphlet that he was carried a 
mile beyond the statesman's gate. Yet, 
like Thackeray, he was not displeased 
with the intimacy with greatness, and 
admits to not a little vanity on the occa- 
sion of a visit from Chatham, at his 
unpretentious lodging at the Stevensons' 



86 BENJAMm FEANKLIN 
on Craven Street, exactly a year to a day 
from the Cockpit episode. The unsuc- 
cessfnl negotiations will not live except 
in the careful memories of historians, 
but from them was born one memorable 
phrase, coined by the Earl of Chatham. 
When he i)resented on February 1, 1775, 
his ^^Provisional Act^' for settling the 
troubles of America, he referred to 
Franklin, with whom he had closely con- 
sulted on the provisions of this Act, as 
^^an honour not to the English nation 
only, but to human nature," and meant 
it to be a deliberate reply to the dis- 
dainful looks and sayings of the blunder- 
ing majority directed against the Amer- 
ican commoner as he leaned against the 
bar in the Cockpit. 

What the incomparable Pitt could not 
effect was certainly too hard a problem 
for the well-meaning Howe and his sister. 
All that remained of their endeavours is 
this statement of Franklin, who proves 
by it that he had done his best to the 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 87 
latest moment to avert what was bound 
to happen. 

The battle of Lexington had been 
fought a little over a fortnight before 
the 5th of May, when Franklin came 
home. His wife had been dead five 
months, but the house in which she had 
faithfully carried out all the directions 
of her husband awaited him. The un- 
abated cheerfulness with which Franklin 
managed to live for many years away 
from the company of his good wife may 
easily give rise to all sorts of surmises. 
He sent her many choice gifts and sums, 
not too frequent, and now and then 
moderately ardent letters. He asked 
and seemed to wish sincerely to have 
her join him in England, but she felt 
the usual terrors of the uneducated for 
untried experiences, and refused to cross 
the Atlantic. So he remained in great 
contentment away from her, and she 
stayed at home, carrying out his be- 
hests as carefully as she could. He 



88 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 
grew stronger in power and influence 
and mental equipment every day : she 
stayed where she was put, dutiful, but 
unprogressive. He was a consummate 
master of the use of his pen: she was 
terribly illiterate, even for those days. 
In 1784, when he was again taking 
up the writing of his Autobiography, 
which he meant for the eyes of all men, 
he paid high tribute to his young wife, 
of whom he says, ^^It was lucky for me 
that I had one as much disposed to in- 
dustry and frugality as myself. '^ But, 
writing to her when she was an old 
woman, three years before her death, 
when she had already begun to fail in 
mind and body, though perhaps he did 
not realise the fact, he, in unloving 
phrase, tells her that she was ^^not very 
attentive to money matters'' in her 
'^best days," and practically orders her 
not to go about among his friends to 
borrow money. His harshness may have 
been necessary, but it is a sufficient rev- 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 89 
elation of that masculine cruelty which 
smiles abroad and wears a hard face at 
home. Probably Deborah Franklin, like 
many another simple-hearted wife, con- 
doned such things as the foibles of 
greatness. 



XII. 

If Franklin felt for a moment the 
loneliness of age on his return to Phila- 
delphia, he was not allowed to cherish it, 
for within a day from his arrival he was 
made one of the three deputies from the 
Assembly to the Continental Congress, 
which met on May 10. As chairman of 
the Committee of Safety for the province, 
an of&ce which he held for eight months, 
the old man was presiding from six to 
nine in the morning; then went to the 
sittings of Congress until four o'clock in 
the afternoon. 

As if serving on ten committees were 
not enough for his nearly seventy years, 
he accepted the office of Postmaster- Gen- 
eral. Dismissed in disgrace as a deputy 
by his mother- country, in a little more 
than a year he was asked by the new 
country to give to the highest position 
possible to him the full benefit of his years 
of experience in post-offices, and was 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 91 
able to lay sure and lasting foundations 
for this important branch of government. 
If he was fond of revenge, Benjamin 
Franklin often had a chance to indulge 
a sweet tooth. As years before he had 
also learned something of the nature of 
preparation for service in the field and 
had mobilised the Pennsylvania forces in 
an efficient manner, so now he addressed 
himself to the task of making ready for 
a longer fight. Perhaps Washington, 
with whom he conferred on the general 
military condition at Cambridge camji 
in October, 1775, remembered how 
Franklin had raised in an incredibly 
short time that baggage train of one hun- 
dred and fifty wagons and pack-horses foi* 
Braddock's expedition just twenty years 
before. It is easy to forget amid the 
general splendour of Franklin's career 
or careers, as we may justly say, that he 
made a respectable record as a soldier. 
When Governor Morris commissioned 
him to take charge of the north-western 



92 BE:N^JAMra FRANKLIK 
frontier, lie actually had nearly six hun- 
dred men under him in service, and de- 
served, according to the words of a con- 
temporary, "a statue for his prudence, 
justice, humanity, and above all for his 
patience." It is fair to assume, then, 
that to Colonel, if not to Postmaster- 
General Franklin, General Washington 
gave a listening ear in those tentative 
days in the camp before Boston. 

The greatest and most exacting period 
of Franklin's life was soon to open, but 
before he actually entered the field of 
high diplomacy he had one more direct 
service to render his country on this 
continent. It has always been a dream 
of continental largeness and vagueness — 
perhaps not yet wholly dissipated — that 
Canada and the United States might in 
some way ^^get together.'' That such 
an idea should gain strength among the 
revolting colonies was most natural, 
however slender the basis for any hopes 
that Canada — always the more provin- 



i BENJAMm FEANKLIK 93 

cial of the two great British posses- 
sions — would disavow allegiance. How- 
ever all this may have been, a commis- 
sion was appointed in 1776 to go to 
Montreal and make the necessary over- 
tures. Samuel Chase, Benjamin Frank- 
lin, and Charles Carroll, the signer, were 
this commission, and with them went 
John Carroll, later Roman Catholic 
archbishop of Baltimore. According to 
Franklin's own account the journey was 
a hard one, and the result unsuccessful. 

' No money could be borrowed, and no 
enthusiasm for separation was discover- 
able. Franklin's health was injured in 
this exposure to a northern spring, but 
he found a good friend in John Carroll, 
whom he afterward had the pleasure of 
naming as the best man for an American 
Roman Catholic bishop. 

Back in Philadelphia by June, he was 
in season to be chosen a delegate from 
that town to a convention for the forma- 
tion of a constitution. He was one of 



94 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 
the five who drafted the Declaration of 
Independence, and was elected on July 8 
as president of this Constitutional Con- 
vention, which chose him within two 
weeks as a member of the Continental 
Congress. Notwithstanding that he had 
sat in a body which had just renounced 
allegiance to the King of England, 
Franklin still found it consistent with 
patriotism and in harmony with his 
fondness for all peaceful measures, when 
they were possible, to accept a posi- 
tion on the committee appointed by 
Congress, consisting of John Adams, 
Edward Rutledge and himself, to listen, 
but hardly more than that, to the two 
brothers. Lord and General William 
Howe, who composed a commission of 
reconciliation. It may be that Franklin 
hoped that such a conference would bear 
more fruit than the numerous meetings 
with the Howe family in London, but, if 
so, his hopes were in vain. Beyond a 
courteous reception and good fare of 



BEI^JAMIN FRANKLIN 95 
cold ham, mutton, claret, and other sub- 
stantial things, the Americans gained 
nothing from this meeting in the Staten 
Island house to convince them that these 
joint commissioners had authority large 
enough to deal with the important issues 
before them. No one has ever doubted 
the sincerity of purpose or the good- will 
of these brothers; but they were in this 
fruitless interview at the mercy of far 
abler men, and they lacked the capacity 
for settling a problem, so far advanced 
toward war, by the higher methods of 
diplomacy. 

With the last hope of mediation gone 
and the Declaration of Independence 
promulgated to do its effective work. 
Congress had to face directly the prac- 
tical side of revolution. So far the col- 
onies had had sufficient vitality to resist 
small and irregular efforts to maintain 
the British authority. Skirmish had been 
well met with skirmish, but all was spo- 
radic, and the Americans were favoured 



96 be:njamin feanklin 

by good fortune. The actual resources 
of England liad not been tested in any 
way. Money and European assistance 
were naturally the first things to be 
thought of. Three countries were ac- 
tively hostile to the mother- country, and 
France was the most important of these 
three. France had lost her possessions in 
North America a quarter of a century be- 
fore, but her feelings in the matter were 
chargeable to England rather than to the 
colonies. What had been wrested from 
her now remained loyal. There was, 
therefore, no especial hostility to the 
American cause; so far as it could be per- 
ceived, '^ revanche'^ then played no part 
in the sentiments of the French. But 
they were watchful and had their plans, 
it would seem, tentatively formed before 
Congress had begun to turn hopefully to 
Louis XVI. and his ministers. 



XIII. 

No one need look, even in the great 
Diplomatic Correspondence of the Eevo- 
lution, for sentimental yearnings on the 
part of these astute French managers 
of statecraft to assist disinterestedly a 
struggling group of colonies in rebellion 
against a common foe. The situation 
was a perfectly cold-blooded one which 
faced the three commissioners, Benjamin 
Franklin, Arthur Lee, and Silas Deane, 
appointed later in 1776, to secure the 
powerful aid of France. Franklin, a 
month before he was seventy- one years 
of age, arrived at IS'antes, used up by 
the second hard experience of travel 
within a twelvemonth. Well might 
Lord Stormont, the British ambassador, 
whom Franklin so unmercifully bull- 
baited in the immediate future, write, 
when he heard of his arrival, that he 
looked upon him as a ^^ dangerous en- 
gine," for Franklin ere long was able to 



98 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 
put the noble lord in a ridiculous position 
by a mot. It was clear to no one just 
why Franklin had come to France. Some 
thought that he was running away from 
a cause soon to collapse, some that he 
might eventually begin to negotiate with 
England ; and, naturally, the majority 
took the obvious view that he was seek- 
ing in some form the support of France 
for the American cause. There was no 
doubt whatever about the sensation 
that he made. It was impossible for 
the English not to admire such a display 
of their favourite virtue, manly courage. 
The French, like the Gauls of old, ^ Etch- 
ing for novelties," as Caesar found them, 
welcomed him as a great curiosity, not 
forgetting his reputation, already estab- 
lished among them, as a man of science 
and a philosopher. 

He became at once so much the ^^man 
of the hour'' that, in self-protection, he 
was obliged to retreat to Passy, which 
remained his headquarters during his 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 99 
mission. There lie planned and trans- 
acted his diplomatic work, there he 
wrote his innumerable letters, among 
them tender messages to charming 
women, with whom he found time to play 
the harmless but assiduous gallant, to 
the disgust of the Adamses and the 
frenzy of Arthur Lee. He even found 
or made time to return to his early trade 
of printing, and in his Passy house set 
up a press, cast types, and printed vari- 
ous jeux cf esprit which he distributed to 
his friends. He brought this plant and 
the fonts of type to America, not with- 
out considerable trouble, and with this 
material set up in business his grandson, 
Benjamin Franklin Bache, later the 
editor of the Aurora and a chief calum- 
niator of Washington, who established, 
or rather disestablished, Bache' s social 
standing by refusing to receive him. 

Seemingly, he was a man of large 
leisure with an opportunity for doing 
many little things. It is a not un- 



100 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 
common trait in ability such as his to 
work much harder out of sight than when 
in the public gaze. Charming as was the 
eifect which he produced by his hoii- 
homie and his leisurely effect on a ner- 
vous race, the errand on which he and 
his associates were bent was serious in all 
conscience, — literally, a ^^ gamble" for a 
continent. By the last of December, 
1776, they had audience with the Count 
de Yergennes, minister for foreign affairs. 
Their credentials were received, and 
their wishes for a treaty of amity and 
commerce pressingly stated. Their 
memorial to Gerard de Eayneval, secre- 
tary of the foreign office, presented soon 
after, was met with some indirection, 
certainly with no assurances of aid. It 
was something, however, to secure two 
million francs to be repaid without in- 
terest, when the American government 
was in a condition to pay its debts. So 
far, so good. But Yergennes, however 
friendly his intentions, was in no posi- 



benjami:n' feanklin loi 

tion to give open offence to Lord Stor- 
mont or his government. Stormont's 
policy was to prevent vessels destined for 
America, and often loaded with impor- 
tant and necessary cargoes for carrying 
on the various requirements of war, from 
clearing from French ports. A large 
portion of the impressive volumes of fac- 
similes so patriotically edited by the late 
Henry Stevens is taken up with the cor- 
respondence occasioned by these harass- 
ing delays. The French government was 
powerless to take a positive stand in re- 
gard to this holding up of outward bound 
vessels, and Stormont pressed the ad- 
vantage of his x>osition to the fullest. 
The American commissioners meanwhile 
were literally besieged by spies, their 
mails were opened, in London, and even 
in Paris. Franklin knew, or at least 
admitted it as a possibility, that his own 
secretary. Dr. Edward Bancroft, was be- 
traying information ; but nothing dis- 
turbed his equanimity, although it was 



102 BENJAMIIN^ FEANKLIN 
necessary for the French police to safe- 
guard the ^^respectable old man'' from 
l^ossible assassination. 

The correspondence and daily busi- 
ness of these commissioners was^ we may 
well believe, exacting to the last degree. 
There was no corps of young attaches to 
which much detail might have advisedly 
been intrusted, no busy little army of 
stenographers and typewriters capable 
of turning off finished pages almost as 
soon as the words were uttered. Every- 
thing had to be done with the care and 
precision which characterised the digni- 
fied processes of diplomacy of the eigh- 
teenth century. It was painful work, 
but it remains a credit to American po- 
litical ability and method. The sailing- 
masters of the little fleet of American 
vessels had to be instructed, warned, 
placated. They, too, were harried by 
British spies, who caught them by the 
sticky lime of dissipation, always dear 
to the easy-going sailor-man, and to be 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 103 

enjoyed at its gayest in la helle France. 
Perhaps one of the hardest tasks which 
befeU Franklin was that of cooling 
down gently, yet decisively, the large 
military aspirations of young French- 
men, many of them of important lineage 
and position, but some of them advent- 
urers pure and simple. The record of 
military service rendered this country 
by gallant French of&cers is so brilliant 
that we may be forgiven a smile when 
we reflect what would have been the 
effect on our army, our commissariat, 
and our military chest, had all the as- 
piring geniuses who sought to rid Amer- 
ica of Britain's chains found their way 
here. But Franklin was equal to oc- 
casions such as these, and, though 
sorely tried by their applications, — sup- 
plications they often were, — managed to 
convey his refusal without giving offence. 
Some of his letters to applicants are mar- 
vels of polite ingenuity. 

More important than the demands of 



104 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 

ravening sea-dogs, some of whom proved 
to be arrant knaves or insolently insub- 
ordinate, or than the importunity of 
aspirants for glory beyond-sea, was the 
need of securing the assistance of other 
European countries. Franklin had ab- 
sorbed so much of the attention of the 
French people that a way to gratify the 
ambition of the other American diplo- 
mats fortunately opened toward other 
fields of diplomacy. Arthur Lee, al- 
ready furiously jealous and suspicious of 
Franklin, essayed to interest Spain and 
Russia in our fortunes, but without suc- 
cess. Carmichael failed at the outset to 
attract Sweden, while John Adams later 
went to Holland, Francis Dana to Eussia, 
Izard to Tuscany. None of them success- 
fully influenced these various countries, 
and France remained through the war 
the true diplomatic stamping-ground. 

There was not so much talk about 
^^ republican simplicity'^ as there was 
later when our government was at last 



BE^JAMII^ FRAKKLIN 105 
a going concern, with, the Federalist 
machinery running and the Republi- 
cans filled with dread, real or assumed, 
of aristocratic tendencies in our official 
life. We were not wholly free from 
monarchical habits of good living in 
high life, and our representatives in 
Europe, especially in Paris, lived com- 
fortably. Although Franklin's style, 
according to Vergennes, was ^^ modest," 
he spent about fifteen thousand dollars a 
year. He drew, however, in a recorded 
fifteen months only a trifle over twelve 
thousand dollars. It is more than one 
hundred and thirty years since this time 
when Franklin and those about him ac- 
complished much because they set up no 
eccentric and novel standards of living 
in the midst of a well-established civil- 
isation ; yet to this day this country 
has never settled to its own satisfac- 
tion whether its foreign representatives 
should set a peculiar social pace or fol- 
low that which is found awaiting them. 



106 BENJAMIK FEANKLIN 
These matters did not trouble Franklin, 
for lie drew upon his own reasonably 
large fortune, and in respect to unself- 
ishness of this sort was as nobly patri- 
otic as Washington himself. According 
to Albert H. Smyth, he discharged the 
^^ varied duties of merchant, consul, 
commissioner, and plenipotentiary, ' ^ 
subject all the while to drafts from Con- 
gress upon loans which it was assumed 
that he had made from the French gov- 
ernment. He seems to have paid his 
personal secretary, his grandson William 
Temple Franklin, out of his own purse, 
for making copies of and caring for the 
vast correspondence incidental to his 
labours, a sum which at no time reached 
over fifteen hundred dollars a year. To 
the day of his death he had pleaded in 
vain for a settlement of the accounts be- 
tween him and the government, which he 
literally carried on his back for nine 
years. Had Benj amin Franklin rendered 
no other service to his country or showu 



BENJAMm FEANKLIN 107 
ability in no other way, his financial ser- 
vices to the United States would entitle 
him to gratitude too large ever to be 
fully repaid. That the government was 
at its wits^ end for money is only an ex- 
planation, hardly an excuse. Any one 
but a Franklin would have been driven 
to madness by the exactions made upon 
him by Congress, through the reluctant 
Morris, but, since he was Benjamin 
Franklin, he shouldered through the 
mess. Perhaps that carelessness and 
lack of order against which he had 
striven — on paper — early in life, by 
means of binding ^^ rules of conduct,'' 
and of which he was insultingly accused 
by Arthur Lee, and even by the honour- 
able but fussy John Adams, may have 
saved him from final despair. What he 
could not perform, he let go, like the wise 
man he was. But, if he was accused of 
slovenly methods of routine, no charge of 
personal gain can be made against him. 
He had boundless opportunity to enrich 



108 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 
himself, — vast sums passed through his 
hands, possible commissions were spread 
before his eyes. Able Americans since 
his day, men without a fraction of his 
commercial and money-getting genius, 
have fallen victims to temptations less 
alluring. But Franklin's record is 
white, although he made no loud pre- 
tences to austerity and even took a tol- 
erant view of the adventurings of Silas 
Deane, and probably was more amused 
than scandalised at that political his- 
trion, the lively and audacious Beau- 
marchais and his little, mysterious bank- 
ing house of Hortalez et Cie. Job-like, 
he found his associates, nominally his 
friends, more trying or elusive even 
than his open enemies. Only on the 
rarest occasion did he lift his voice or 
use his pen against any of them, and 
then with a display of serenest dignity. 



XIV. 

It is difficult to tell the complicated 
tale of Franklin in France. There were 
many chapters, and the threads of narra- 
tive run in many directions. It is not 
necessary to disentangle these threads or 
to make continuity out of confusion. 
The main object of the commissioners 
was to secure an effectual treaty of amity 
and commerce, and then of alliance for 
mutual defence. Lord Stormont's object 
was to prevent such plans, and it was 
the part of Yergennes to be gracious to 
America and make no open breach, at 
least not yet, with England. So at first 
matters went on, — things do not drag in 
Paris, — the situation growing tenser, 
and harder for the commissioners than 
for any one else. To their surprise came 
a sudden and happy conclusion for the 
anxious envoys. The French were full 
of enthusiasm for the ^ ' insurgents, ' ' but, 
in spite of Franklin's efforts, had no dis- 



110 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 
position to put money into the American 
Eevolution as an investment. Vergennes, 
forced by Stormont, moved rather threat- 
eningly against the violations of the 
neutrality laws by privateers, which 
were actually hurrying prizes out of 
French ports. This statesman even felt 
obliged to oppose the publication of 
Dubourg's translation, made at the in- 
stance of Franklin, of our various State 
constitutions. The public meanwhile, 
in cafes and in the streets, grew hotter 
and hotter, so far as zeal counts, for the 
American cause, and in the centre of all 
the tumult was the picturesque figure of 
an old man of simple garb, benign of 
countenance, spectacled and fur- capped, 
a true homme du peuple^ yet withal a 
cool and calculating manipulator of great 
destinies. 

But under all this froth there was a 
good brew. Enthusiasm had a substan- 
tial basis. Washington's capture of the 
Hessians at Trenton in December, 1776, 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 111 

and the defeat of the British at Princeton 
a few days later, gave joy in Paris, but 
it was not comparable to that caused by 
the news of Burgoyne's surrender at 
Saratoga on October 17, 1777. The 
official news reached the French govern- 
ment on December 4. Twelve days later 
the commissioners were told that the in- 
dependence of America would be recog- 
nised, and that the treaties would be 
made. These treaties were signed on 
February 6, 1778, and the envoys, who 
up to this time were recognised only as 
private citizens, were received at court 
and this diplomatic achievement made 
public. No wonder that a British spy 
wrote that Doctor Franklin ^4s all life 
and full of spirits," though he did not 
fail to add defiantly, if illiterately, '^pos- 
siably his course may be stopped shortly. ' ' 
The old man, in plainest but most de- 
corous attire, no wig upon his venerable 
head, no buckles on his shoes, no sword 
at his side, was received as American 



112 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 
commissioner, in mid-March, at the 
court of Louis XYI. A month later 
the Oomte d'Estaing had sailed with the 
French fleet for America. Not France 
alone, but England, experienced the crisis 
caused by Burgoyne's sarrender. The 
party of peace, never despicable in size 
or importance, grew in strength at this 
time. Franklin was in continual corre- 
spondence from this time on with such 
men as David Hartley and Dr. John 
Fothergill, — old associates in higher 
matters than the killing of human beings, 
and grave, determined lovers of peace. 
It was the natural object of these and 
other noble-minded Englishmen to dis- 
cover a plan for ending the war without 
abasing England. Franklin was as hu- 
mane as they, but entertained no proj- 
ect which did not involve a consider- 
ation of America's independence. That 
to him was already an accomplished fact. 
It was John Adams who brought prim 
order out of annoying, even ridiculous 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 113 
chaos, when he supplanted Silas Deane 
who had been recalled by Congress, and 
who advised that Franklin be made sole 
plenipotentiary to France. 

Though there was still an incredible 
amount to do, the business was prac- 
tically now in Franklin's hands, and he 
was free to have his table littered and 
his papers in disorder, if he so chose to 
have them. Things went better, although 
they went none too easily. He could, 
however, look about him a little and 
draw a long breath when he wished. 
He was still the rage, — no man who ever 
lived was ever more so. The various 
biographies are full of this extraordinary 
popularity, which extended to every 
article of his attire and to his personal 
peculiarities. 

It is impossible to write of the endless 
enthusiasm for everything he did or was 
without going over again one or another 
well-beaten biographical trail. Not only 
were there put on the market Franklin 



114 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 

snuff-boxes, stoves, portraits, busts, com- 
mon articles of ornament or use, but 
he himself was honoured by election to 
learned societies, chief among them the 
Academie des Sciences, as a foreign associ- 
ate. Italy, Spain, Eussia, honoured him 
greatly, but always as a man of science, 
as a philosopher, not as a statecrafts- 
man. It is impossible not to suppose that 
Franklin was delighted at all this hom- 
age, — from the passing, frivolous sort, 
gone in an hour, had he made a political 
misstep, to the graver sort which recog- 
nised in him the embodiment of the 
spirit of the age in science and progress 
and of the new republican genius over 
seas. What wonder is it that the 
man who made a phrase (ga ird) that 
lived through a wilder revolution than 
our own, uttered in hours of discour- 
agement to put new life into our cause, 
— what wonder is it that, buoyant, hope- 
ful, though old in years, he failed in 
prophetic instinct, and had no percep- 



BENJAMIK FEANKLIN 115 

tions of the hideous commotions under- 
ground to break out only ten years later! 
He was not a young man to see visions, 
but for an old man he dreamed few 
dreams of the past, and lived intensely 
in a vivid and engrossing j)resent. To 
say that his head was turned by all 
this adulation would be to fail utterly 
to understand the composition of that 
head, as well balanced and composed a 
structure as ever surmounted a human 
body. 

The one thorn in Franklin's com- 
placent frame at this period was John 
Adams, who returned to Europe almost 
a year and a half after Franklin had 
been left in sole charge in Paris. He, 
too, was a great man, and great men 
oftentimes cannot sleep in the same bed, 
especially in political life. Fortunately, 
these two at heart each had an enormous 
respect for the other's main purposes. 
In the sifting process of history these 
differences amount to little more than 



116 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 

this, that Franklin thought that Adams 
was too fussy, and the latter thought 
that his compeer was not fussy enough. 
Both were undoubtedly right, — certainly 
no part of the cause they served so glori- 
ously was in the least injured by their 
differing attitudes. 

The main object of his presence in 
France Franklin never suffered to be 
turned aside by such minor distractions 
as the quarrels of the captains, the 
importunities of adventurers, or the 
humiliating opposition of such men as 
Izard and the Lees. He was there to 
raise money to prosecute the war and 
to make the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence a living force. In all, up to 1783, 
he had secured from the French govern- 
ment 18,000,000 livresy to be paid finally 
by 1798; 10,000,000 livres tournois ob- 
tained in Holland, for which the French 
king made himself responsible; and, 
lastly, 9,000,000 livres tournois as ^^gratu- 
itous assistance fi'om the pure generosity 



BENJAMm FEANKLIN 117 

of the King. ' ' Of this last gift, 1, 000, 000 
livres were, so to speak, lost in transit 
from the Eoyal Treasury to the banking- 
house of M. Grand, It is a mystery not 
yet solved. Mr. Smyth says, ^^It has 
been traced to the doors of Beanmar- 
chais's bank J beyond that point all 
knowledge of it ceases.'' Yet it was the 
fervid Beaumarchais, who, on hearing 
of the news of Burgoyne's surrender 
brought to France by Jonathan Loring 
Austin, made such haste to Paris and to 
Franklin that he nearly killed himself in 
a carriage, — a bearer of glad tidings, 
this buoyant, not scrupulous, yet by no 
means hateful gambler with destiny, 
Caron de Beaumarchais. 



XV. 

With the progress of American affairs, 
during his absence, no brief estimation 
of Franklin's career need have much to 
do. To astonish and enrapture France, 
while at the time he was gaining every 
point in financing the war, — that was his 
task, and it was after a while an accom- 
plished fact. Meanwhile the Eevolu- 
tionary cause was advancing, freshly 
energised by the needful sinews, the 
livres tournois so skilfully diverted into 
our empty chest. As our prospects 
brightened, the friends of peace in Eng- 
land waxed bolder, and the govern- 
ment' s policy waned. There was rumour 
of the possibility of peace, tentative 
talks were held and messages written, 
but this basis for negotiations was un- 
sound as long as the British clung to the 
vain hope of a reconciliation and sought 
to continue colonial dependence. There 
was another obstacle to progress in these 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 119 

irenic negotiations. It would be easy to 
concede much to America, could but the 
mother- country ^^ avenge the faithless 
and insolent conduct of France.'^ 

No one understood better than Franklin 
how much was due to France or how 
scrupulously our obligations to her must 
be kept in any acts, diplomatic or other- 
wise, which pointed to a better under- 
standing with England. A man as 
brilliant as Mr. Blaine might seem to 
forget such an agreement as the Clayton- 
Bulwer treaty, but it is impossible that 
Benjamin Franklin could forget the 
treaties of amity and commerce and 
alliance for mutual defence signed in 
February, 1778. He really loved and 
trusted France and even Yergennes as 
much as a wise and experienced old 
man could implicitly trust anything or 
anybody in a world so uncertain, even 
for an optimist. From an ardent lover 
of England, he had come to dislike and 
distrust her political methods, and what 



120 BENJAMIK FEANKLIN 
little hate there was in his ample nature 
was freely expressed for her arbitrariness. 
He never withheld his scorn from the 
amiable Hartley or from any of the va- 
rious Englishmen who sought long for 
some accommodation by which peaceful 
measures might be considered. 

It is a wholly unnecessary task to go 
into the least detail of the negotiations. 
They are, to say the truth, tiresome in the 
extreme, and, when intelligible, not in 
any way luminous. But they went on 
sporadically until Cornwallis gave it up 
at Yorktown in October, 1781. Even 
after that event, when N^orth saw that 
'^all was over," Franklin spurned the 
suggestion that England and America 
treat separately, without the partnership 
of France. The ^orth ministry lasted 
five months longer. Eichard Oswald, 
under the new Eockingham ministry, now 
enters on the scene, armed with good 
sense and reasonably full discretionary 
powers, but with no commission to treat. 



BEKJAMIK FEANKLIN 121 

The efforts of George Grenville to deal 
with France, and that meant with Yer- 
gennes, on somewhat parallel lines, may 
be neglected in this brief consideration. 
These efforts came to naught when the 
Shelburne ministry came in on the death 
of Rockingham. Oswald's powers were 
now increased. When at last he was 
enabled by his government to treat with 
the United States of America rather 
than with ^^ Colonies or Plantations/^ 
matters began to go forward. 

Then happened a strange thing. Jay 
and Adams were suspicions of the ulti- 
mate intentions of Vergennes, and doubted 
his ingenuousness in regard to American 
as contrasted with French interests. 
They believed that Franklin was in some 
way deceived. Franklin, on the other 
hand, was anxious to complete the business 
before Parliament met again, and finally 
yielded to his two fellow- commissioners. 
Parliament did not meet until December 
5, 1782, and on November 30 prelimi- 



122 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 
nary and provisional articles were 
signed. Not until a treaty of peace 
had been executed between France and 
England was this treaty to be made de- 
finitive. The long and the short of it 
was that Franklin — for on him must the 
greatest responsibility rest — had negoti- 
ated with England alone without direct 
communication with the French court. 
It was his unpleasant task to inform 
Vergennes, as he did the next day, of the 
secret conclusion of the preliminary 
treaty, contrary to the definite instruc- 
tions of Congress, and certainly contrary 
to the obligations implied and expressed 
which rested upon him personally to be 
oi)en and loyal to Yergennes. The letter 
of the astute French statesman to Frank- 
lin was not a billet-doux, nor was Frank- 
lin' s reply without a touch of over-ex- 
planation when no explanation ought 
to have been necessary. But the incident 
really went no further, and the definitive 
treaties between the three powers were 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 123 

signed on September 3, 1783. Strategi- 
cally, the signing of the treaties with 
France in 1778 was the most significant 
act of Franklin^ s life, but his part in the 
treaty of peace was certainly the crowning 
act. Yet there was a fly in the ointment, 
and an uneasy sense of something wan ting- 
to make it a serene and perfect ceremony. 
Yergennes in his letter to Luzerne, 
the French minister to the United States, 
accused Franklin of yielding ^ ^ too easily 
to the bias of his colleagues,'^ Jay and 
Adams, ^^ who do not pretend to recog- 
nise the rules of courtesy in regard to 
us." He did so yield, but we may well 
believe not '^too easily,'' and really 
against his own judgment. It were a 
long argument to defend or to attack 
Franklin successfully on this the great 
critical act of his career, one far more 
fraught with consequences than his 
publication of the Hutchinson- Oliver 
letters. In both cases he compromised 
something, — perhaps it was his personal 



124 BENJAMm FEAKKLIN 
honour. But successful statecraft seems 
unhappily to involve the necessity of 
compromise. The final answer to all dis- 
cussion in this complicated problem will 
have to be that Franklin^ through no fault 
or virtue of his, by yielding to the honest, 
irascible Adams and the courteous, up- 
right, suspicious Jay, proved himself to 
have had some interior wisdom greater 
than his understanding, for it is beyond 
much peradventure that the two ob- 
structionists to his desire for openness 
with France were mainly right in their 
fears and hesitations. 

So practically were ended the great 
services abroad of the American pleni- 
potentiary who during many years past 
had said and written with almost tire- 
some iteration that there was no good 
war and no bad peace. He remained in 
France to conclude commercial treaties 
with Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, 
Morocco, and lastly with Prussia to stop 
privateering. 



XVI. 

In spite of trying circumstances of 

many kinds, Franklin continued his life 

1 in Paris. The old friendly relations with 

individuals and with the whole iDeople 

continued to the last. Born in Boston, 

where the holy zeal of the early days 

I was passing and only the austerity re- 

' mained, he seemed notwithstanding to 

I have no trace of Puritanism in his mar- 

j row. John Adams, born much later, had 

i enough for them both. Franklin, if we 

I will but admit it, was really an English- 

I man, — a man of national, not colonial 

I build. He was a Middle-States man by 

^ adoption, and assimilated easily the 

; larger complacency of Pennsylvania 

ways. The worldliness of Parisian life 

troubled him as an old man as little 

as Boston Puritanism interested him 

when a boy. His orbit was large, and, 

above all things, he was not parochial. 

It is difficult not to believe that his in- 



126 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 
tense affectation of a supposedly Amer- 
ican dress, with its ultra- republican 
simplicity, was a harmless pose. How- 
ever all this may be, he undoubtedly 
conversed enjoy ably with philosophers 
and wits, saw life of every kind without 
being in the least affected unfavourably 
by extravagances. He ate good dinners 
and drank good liquors, in spite of his 
gout, of which he wrote as of a cherished 
friend. But, above all things, he liked 
the company of clever women, and they 
adored him. 

Nothing in the life of any man can be 
more diverting or innocent than his let- 
ters to the daughter of Bishop Jona- 
than Shipley, to whom he wrote the 
famous epitaph on the squirrel, one 
of his cleverest jeux d^ esprit, or to 
Mary Stevenson, at whose mother^ s 
house in Craven Street Franklin lodged 
so long and so happily when in London. 
His letters to Miss Stevenson are full of 
his best humour and good sense, yet these 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 127 

two friends could write on serious matters. 
In fact, this charming young lady had 
an astonishingly well-supplied mind, and 
was always ready to improve it. On 
these occasions the Doctor would reply 
as gravely as to a member of the Eoyal 
Society. In some of these Shipley and 
Stevenson letters Franklin appears to his 
best advantage as a sprightly, courteous 
gentleman of the world, never pedantic, 
never advancing too far in his sallies of 
robustious humour. 

In his letters to French women, how- 
ever, the spirit of gallantry is evident, — 
too evident for those who then and since 
had no relish for such epistolary chat- 
terings. Had this disrelish not existed, 
it is improbable that the sixscore of 
letters written him by Madame Brillon, 
to whose daughter Franklin wished to 
marry his grandson William Temple 
Franklin, would have remained unpub- 
lished until Mr. Smyth gave us the best 
of them in the last volume of his defini- 



128 BEKJAMIN FRAKKLIN 
tive edition of the Works. The worst 
that one can say of Franklin in this 
whole matter is that toward that large 
and complicated subject known as the 
^^ ladies" he was soft. Some men do 
not like to be called Cher Pajya, espe- 
cially when they are old or getting to 
be so, but Franklin liked it. He spent 
much time, and doubtless much energy, — 
since tender letters are seldom sponta- 
neous, — in communing with a woman who 
assures him that her ^^soul is pure, 
simple, frank." She was not simple, 
however frank, when she skilfully put 
aside Franklin's proposal that her 
daughter and his grandson should be 
married. To say that she was a French 
woman is to say that she was clever. 
If she was tantalising, she was also pru- 
dent. She tells him that no one loves 
him more than she does, but refuses him 
a treasure ^^ which does not belong to me. 
I guard it and will always guard it care- 
fully." There is abundant reason to 



BEJS^JAMII^ FEANKLIK 129 
suppose in glancing over these many let- 
ters, written in her extravagant humour 
and in Franklin's indifferent yet viva- 
cious French, that the old man was not 
wholly satisfied to be ^^good Papa'' to 
his Chere Jille. Madame Brillon may 
not have bettered, though she did not 
lower, his ethical standards, but she did 
correct his French assiduously, and that 
is much to be grateful for when one is 
seventy-five. So verging sometimes, in 
their epistolary fashion, on the flowery 
edge of temptation, the French lady was 
always the more dainty in her risky 
steps, while ' ' My Lord the Ambassador, ' ' 
as she calls him, treads at times heavily, 
even coarsely. 

And there was Madame Helvetius of 
Auteuil, almost beloved of Franklin, and 
quite despised by Abigail, wife of John 
Adams. Sixty years had not taken away 
her power to charm, nor had they 
taught her to spell. Her letters lack 
the sparkle of Madame Br illon's, and are 



130 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 
heavier with sentiment. She was a 
'^kindly old soul/' in the common par- 
lance, and drew about her distinguished 
men of every sort, — men, however, who 
probably did not object to shine by con- 
trast with their hostess j but Mrs. Adams 
thought her dirty. In one of his famous 
jeux W esprit J the ^ ^ Visit to the Elysian 
Fields," Franklin makes her the frank- 
est sort of an offer of his hand, but in a 
post-mortem kind of way, for he imagines 
in the similitude of a dream, not in the 
choicest taste, that his wife and Helve- 
tius have happily paired off, and so re- 
turns to earth and Madame Helvetius 
with the cry, '■ ' Let us avenge ourselves. ' ' 
But Mesdames Brillon and Helvetius 
were not anxious to ally themselves 
directly or indirectly to the house of 
Franklin, and remained only good 
friends to their American hero. There 
were other charming women to admire 
and be admired in France, but these 
two were first in his affections. 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 131 
Mr. Smyth, in Ms rapid summary of 
Franklin's life which closes the defini- 
tive edition, draws a picture of Frank- 
lin sitting in his Philadelphia home on 
his return, attended by his ^^very gross 
and rather homely' ' daughter, visited by 
curious or homage-paying visitors, while 
his thoughts wander back to the pleasant 
land of France and the brilliant men and 
engaging women with whom he lived for 
years on such intimate and agreeable 
terms. One can but wonder whether 
the aged and fast dissolving philosopher 
contrasted his American home — and he 
always seemed to have loved a home in 
spite of his long and easily borne absences 
— with that gayer life. Did he ever smile 
grimly to himself at the strange, almost 
inexplicable misspelling of his daughter's 
married name which Madame Helv6tius 
used in her letters, and wish that the pros- 
perous old French lady had softened her 
heart, so that he might have ended his 
days in her agreeable company? 



XVII. 

In 1785 Franklin bethought himself 
of getting home. He was now in his 
eightieth year; his life-work was really 
done — so Jie thought — and he was in a 
feeble condition from the gout and gravel. 
Thomas Jefferson had been appointed 
his successor in March, and in May 
Franklin received the permission of Con- 
gress to return. The French king gave 
him a magnificent present, — a mini- 
ature of himself surrounded by a 
wreath of over four hundred diamonds, — 
a litter of the queen, drawn by mules, 
^^who walk steadily and easily, '^ was 
provided for the journey to Havre, — a 
necessarily slow journey because bodily 
disturbance gave him pain. There was 
a vast amount of baggage on which the 
English customs collected no duty. Ar- 
rived at Southampton from Havre, he 
went to the Isle of Wight. He saw some 
of his old English friends, and sailed 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 133 

from Cowes in a Philadelphia packet- 
boat, July 28, 1785. Among those who 
bade him farewell was his son, William 
Franklin, long alienated from his father 
by his espousal of the Loyalist cause. 
How sincere was the reconciliation no 
one can say : there was at least the out- 
ward aspect of paternal and filial de- 
corum. Before he sailed, he visited Mar- 
tin's salt-water hot bath and fell asleep 
in the water, on his back, watch in 
hand, and kept this position for nearly 
an hour. Did ever another philosopher 
in undress so utilise his time 1 

If there were wanting anything to 
attest the extraordinary nature of Frank- 
lin' s ability, one fact would be enough. 
Experienced travellers, even in these days 
of comfortable going, agree that mental 
work at sea is impracticable and gener- 
ally impossible. Yet this wonderful man 
spent the seven weeks of his voyage in 
writing memorable things, among them 
a treatise on smoky chimneys, another 



134 BENJAMi:^^ FEANKLIN 

on the Gulf Stream and other maritime 
facts and problems, and yet a third on 
the burning of pit- coal. On Wednesday, 
September 14, on a flood-tide and a 
morning breeze he came in sight of 
^ ' dear Philadelphia. " ^ ' We landed at 
Market Street Wharf, where we were 
received by a crowd of people with huz- 
zas, and accompanied with acclamations 
quite to my door. Found my family 
well. God be praised and thanked for 
all his Mercies ! " Such was the home- 
coming of Benjamin Franklin, vener- 
ated, in spite of some discordant criticism 
which has lasted to this day, by two con- 
tinents for reasons which appeal to the 
good sense and discernment of common 
humanity. 

It was his expressed hope to be left in 
peace, but he had yet to receive many 
honours, chief among them the presi- 
dency of Pennsylvania. The American 
Philosophical Society, the University of 
Pennsylvania, and the Assembly of that 



BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 135 

Commonwealth addressed him in a 
formal way. He was also a delegate to 
the Convention of States, convened in 
1787, for deliberation on a National Con- 
stitution, and he attended the meetings 
faithfully, although walking was now 
difficult to him on account of his infirm- 
ities. There was truth in his remark 
made on his return, that his countrymen, 
having eaten his flesh, were resolved to 
pick his bones. But he probably liked 
the insistence on his remaining a public 
and active figure. His mind was still 
alert. He took the same interest ia 
everything. Even a two-headed snake 
taken from the Schuylkill was not be- 
neath his attention. Of greater import 
to him must have been the news of a 
^^boat moved by a steam engine which 
rows itself against tide in our river." 
This was Fitch's invention, and he saw 
the possibilities of it, even stating it as 
his belief that it would ^^ become gener- 
ally useful," but even his far-reaching 



136 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 
mind could not guess how useful. He 
met all happenings witt his usual com- 
placency. To his sister Jane, his fa- 
vourite from early life, he wrote, ^^ I have 
long been accustomed to receive more 
blamC; as well as more praise, than I 
have deserved." But his two ancient 
foes, the gout and the gravel, of which 
he always spoke with ironical respect 
and with a real gratitude that they were 
not worse, were gaining on his years and 
his strength. 

For the last two years of his life 
Franklin had withdrawn largely from 
public affairs and service, but continued 
to write letters and some papers of con- 
siderable though not the first importance. 
In 1789 he wrote his Observations Relative 
to the Intentions of the Original Founders 
of the Academy in Philadelphia, in which he 
brought forward with all his usual vigour 
his favourite theory that the English 
language should be taught '^grammati- 
cally and as a language.' ' While he did 



be:njamin fea:n'klin 137 

not undervalue learning, lie regarded — 
and did not hesitate to say it — the teach- 
ing of Latin and Greek as equivalent to 
the habit of wearing the hat under the 
arm, long after the use of wigs had made 
the practice necessary; ''the chapeau 
bras of modern literature" he called 
them. The annals of the leading Amer- 
ican university for the past twenty years 
will show that this position taken by 
Franklin has, a hundred years later, 
grown to be a guiding principle, — first 
the English language, then the rest if you 
will. He was interested in the abolition 
of the slave-trade, and was i)resident of 
the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting 
the Abolition of Slavery. His signing the 
memorial of the society presented to the 
National House of Eepresentatives on 
February 12, 1789, was his last act of 
a public nature. On March 23 of the 
year, less than a month before his death, 
he sent to the Federal Gazette an ironical 
skit alleged to have been delivered by 



138 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 

Sicli Mehemet Ibrahim, of Algiers, in 
defence of slavery. 

Small things as well as great still en- 
gaged his yet active intelligence. His 
zeal for good printing, good paper, good 
type, never died in him, though it must 
be said that he left no remarkable typo- 
graphical monument as evidence of his 
faith. In fact, he was less fertile in device 
as a printer than in anything he achieved. 
In his trade he was really a conservative, 
and as late as 1789 was regretting the 
growing disuse of italic letters and of 
the long ^S," comparing the monotonous 
effect thus produced to the paring of all 
men's noses smooth and level with their 
faces, though it rendered ^Hheir physi- 
ognomies less distinguishable." He dis- 
liked what he called ^^gray printing," 
and his letter of December, 1789, to 
Noah "Webster tells him that the Phila- 
delphia edition of his famous American 
Spelling Book is miserably printed and 
on ^^ wretched paper." He always re- 



be:n^jamin feanklin 139 

spected the usages of his craft, if he did 
not do much to better them. One flash 
of the old zeal for improving things is 
seen in his suggestion to put an interro- 
gation at the beginning of a question in- 
stead of at the end. 

On March 9, 1790, he wrote that famous 
letter to Ezra Stiles, president of 
Yale College, with whom existed a 
friendship) of uncommon strength and 
mutual trust. In it he affirms nearly all 
of the religious faith which he was will- 
ing to profess, and it never suffers by 
repetition. Few philosophical minds 
of the eighteenth century went further, 
and most of them did not go so far. 
^^Here/' he says with memorable brev- 
ity, ^ Ms my creed. '^ ^^I believe in one 
God, the creator of the universe. That 
he governs it by his Providence. That 
he ought to be worshipped. That the 
most acceptable service we render to him 
is doing good to his other children. That 
the soul of man is immortal, and will be 



140 BE:N^JAMI]Sr FEANKLIN 
treated with justice in another life respect- 
ing its conduct in this. These I take to be 
the fundamental points in all religion, and 
I regard them as you do in whatever sect 
I meet with them.'' He wrote in bed 
on March 24 to his sister Jane a cheerful 
letter for one in his condition, reiterating 
that, though his malady was severe, he 
could reflect with fortitude on how many 
more horrible evils the human body is 
subject to, and that he has been blessed 
with ^^a long life of health . . . free from 
them all. ' ' The last letter he ever wrote 
was to Thomas Jefferson on April 8, re- 
calling with perfect clearness his memory 
of the St. Croix Eiver boundary and 
sending him a map of Passamaquoddy 
Bay. 

Nine days later he died, on April 17, 
1790, at the age of eighty- four years and 
three months. An aposteme, which had 
formed in the lungs, suddenly burst. 
His strength did not enable him suffi- 
ciently to throw off the discharge, and it 



BE:^JAMIN FRAKKLIK 141 

is safe to say that septicaemia from the 
absorption of the remaining pus was the 
direct cause of the death. Whatever 
may be our view of the philosophy and 
the religion — if so we may call it — of 
Benjamin Franklin, there is no doubt 
whatever that they were steadfast aids 
to his composure as he neared and met 
his end. The nearest approach he made 
to a murmur at his pain were the words, 
reputed to have been his last, ^^A dy- 
ing man can do nothing easy." By a 
curious turn of destiny this great apostle 
of good sense, this philosopher so free 
from whimsies and small prejudices, is 
supposed, if we may believe the words 
as recorded by John Adams of his at- 
tending physician, Dr. John Jones, to 
have succumbed neither to the gout nor 
the stone, but to a cold caught by sitting 
in the cold current coming through an 
open window. For half a century he 
had been proclaiming that colds were not 
caught simply by the coldness of the air, 



142 be:n^jamin^ franklin 

but by draughts, moisture, and other con- 
comitants. This proves nothing of course 
except that, when one is nearly ninety, it 
is unwise to test too strongly the hy- 
I)otheses of middle life. He was, how- 
ever, a famous therapist, as well as a 
multitude of other excellent things, and 
deserves no ridicule because he fell a 
victim to his own empirical tests. His 
funeral and burial were as impressive as 
his life had been simple. Of the re- 
spect shown by persons, institutions, 
and political bodies every biography 
speaks at length. His memory was 
honoured in every possible way, — in 
public meeting, resolutions, addresses, 
and orations, — but in no way more 
signally than by the printers of Paris, 
who, on the occasion of a memorial meet- 
ing, caused to be set up, printed, and dis- 
tributed to the audience the speech de- 
livered by one of their number. 

If the French printers thus signalised 
the one calling of which Franklin was 



BENJAMII^ FEANKLIK 143 
most proud, he in his last will did not per- 
mit the fact to be forgotten, for this formal 
paper begins, '^I, Benjamin Franklin, 
of Philadelphia, printer," and then 
goes on to say also, as if of secondary im- 
port, ^ ^ late Minister Plenipotentiary from 
the United States of America to the Court 
of France, now President of the State of 
Pennsylvania." There is a slight but a 
sure ring of a commoner's defiance in thus 
putting occupation before office, or it may 
have been a harmless vanity to run up the 
crescendo of achievements. It was a 
famous will and carefully considered. No 
item therein contained is so well remem- 
bered as that relating to the sums devised 
to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia. 
These sums which were to have accrued 
according to his shrewd and authorita- 
tively correct calculations have not 
turned out to be so large by a great deal 
as he thought they must, but they are 
respectably large. From the Boston 
fund has been established the worthy 



144 BENJAMIN FEANKLIN 

Franklin Union with its trades-school 
and other practical aids to aspiring 
youth. On the large plate glass of a 
bank in Philadelphia many have seen 
the legend: ^^ Estate of Benjamin 
Franklin. Estate of Stephen Girard." 
The potent influence of his life and of 
his honestly earned fortune still abides 
in a concrete and substantial way in the 
city of his adoption. 



XYIII. 

The world — two worlds rather — have 
seen fit to ignore the defects of this most 
unusual man and to remember his virtues 
and his accomplishments as the qualities 
of few men, since history began, have 
been remembered. The minutiaG of his 
excellences are recalled. His witty say- 
ings, his wise proverbs, are so familiar 
that they are part of the common mental 
inheritance of the race and are hardly 
now attributable to the author of them. 
Like the Bible and Shakespeare, his 
homely wisdom has lost its personal 
attribution. It is indeed a wonderful 
record. If one thinks of humble be- 
ginnings and great endings, one thinks 
of Franklin. The name occurs to every 
one who speaks of the dawn of electrical 
knowledge, of the growth of printing in 
this country, of the post-office system, of 
protection against fire, of early journal- 
ism, of the first successes in the pub- 



146 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 
lication of books, of the foundation of 
free libraries and free schools and col- 
leges. In American art we must con- 
sider the innumerable busts, engravings, 
medals, paintings, and other attempts to 
preserve the features of this plain Ameri- 
can. ■ He ventured into the field of the- 
ology, philanthropy, philology, ethics, 
and even of military affairs. It would 
be a hard task to say whether he stands 
higher in reputation as a scientist or 
as a diplomat, for surely science and 
diplomacy have little in common, and 
few men have achieved greatness in both 
callings ; yet it would be safe to say that 
he was pre-eminent in both. His own 
time thought so, and there is no reason 
to dispute the decision now. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 

The few titles here given will amply 
serve as a guide to a reasonably full 
knowledge of Franklin's life and writ- 
ings. A host of books have been written 
about him, many of them dealing with 
particular episodes of his career. Of 
his own writings many editions of no 
real consequence have appeared since the 
first issuance of his famous Autobiog- 
raphy. These editions generally contain 
this Life, some of his best-known essays, 
and almost without exception the famous 
Way to Wealth, which was a garnering of 
the more familiar sayings first incorpo- 
rated in the Foor EicharcVs Almanacs. 
With the publication of John Bigelow's 
edition of the Life in 1874 begins the 
latest and only important knowledge 
of Franklin from a modern standpoint. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

BoGGESS, Arthur Clinton, and Emma 
Eepplier Witmer. Calendar of the 



14:8 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Papers of Benjamin Franklin in the 
Library of the University of Pennsyl- 
vania. (Philadelphia, 1908.) 

Calendar of the Papers of Benjamin 
Franklin in the Library of the Ameri- 
can Philosophical Society. Edited by I. 
Minis Hays (Philadelphia, 1908. 5 vols. ). 

The Extraordinary Library of 
Samuel W. Pennypacker. Part I. 
To be sold, December 14, 1905. (Phila- 
delphia, 1905.) Part I. contains books 
printed by Benjamin Franklin, books 
from the library of Benjamin Franklin, 
letters written by Benjamin Franklin 
and his son, William Franklin, etc. 
Ford, Paul Leicester. Franklin 
bibliography. A list of books written 
by or relating to Benjamin Franklin. 
(Brooklyn, K Y., 1889.) Up to the time 
of his death Mr. Ford was an indefati- 
gable student of Franklin and collector of 
Frankliniana. This bibliography still 
remains the best, although it is over 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 149 

twenty years old. Its immediate pre- 
decessor was the Catalogue of Works re- 
lating to Benjamin Franklin in the 
Boston Public Library, including the 
Collection given by Dr. Samuel Abbott 
Green. [Compiled by Lindsay Swift.] 
United States. Libraky of Con- 
gress. Division of Manusckipts. 
List of the Benjamin Franklin Papers in 
the Library of Congress. Compiled under 
the direction of Worthington C. Ford 
(Washington, 1905). 

WORKS BY FRANKLIN 

Works. . . . With notes and a life of the 
author. By Jared Sparks (Boston, 1836- 
40: Hilliard, Gray & Co. 10 vols.). 
This edition of Franklin's works super- 
seded the edition in six volumes [Phila- 
delphia, 1809-18, Duane], edited by 
his grandson, William Temple Franklin. 
It was in turn superseded by : 
Complete Works. . . . Compiled and 
edited by John Bigelow (N"ew York, 



150 BIBLIOGEAPHY 

1887-88: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 10 
vols.). 

Writings. . . . Collected and edited 
with a life and introduction by Albert 
Henry Smyth (i^ew York, 1905-07: 
The Macmillan Co. 10 vols. ). This may 
safely be regarded as the definitive edition 
of Franklin's works and as taking the 
place of the Bigelow edition, sets of 
which have now grown scarce. 

Autobiography. Edited from his man- 
uscripts with notes and introduction 
by John Bigelow (Philadelphia, 1868 : 
Lippincott & Co.). Later editions fol- 
lowed. Out of the great number of edi- 
tions of the Autobiography this is the 
first in point of time which demands 
the attention of the modern reader. 
Afterward expanded into : 

Life. . . • , written by himself. ]N"ow 
first edited from original manuscripts 
and from his printed correspondence and 
other writings by John Bigelow (Phila- 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 151 

delphia, 1874: Lippincott & Co. 3 
vols.). A ^^ fifth edition, enriched/' 
was published in 1905. 

Autobiography . . . , and a sketch of 
Franklin's life from the point where the 
Autobiography ends, drawn chiefly from 
his old letters. With notes and a chrono- 
logical historical table. (Boston, [1896] : 
Houghton, Mifflin & Co. [Eiverside 
Literature Series. ] ) An inexpensive and 
serviceable edition, quite good enough 
for ordinary use. 

Autobiography. With an introduction 
by Woodrow Wilson. (New York, 1901 : 
The Century Co. [The Century Clas- 
sics.] ) 

Autobiography of Benjamin Frank- 
lin. (Boston, 1906: Houghton, Mifflin & 
Co.) Beautifully printed, but without 
any especial distinction of editing. 
Franklin's life was told in homely fash- 
ion for plain people, and seems to require 
no splendid raiment to adorn it. Like 



152 BIBLIOGEAPHY 

a fine-looking man of toil, it appears to 

best advantage in workaday clothes. 

Poor Eichard's Almanac and other 
papers. With notes. (Boston, 1886: 
Houghton, Mifflin & Co. [Eiverside Lit- 
erature Series.]) Serviceable and inex- 
pensive, but not so useful as: 

^^The Sayings of Poor Eichard." 
The prefaces, proverbs, and poems of 
Benjamin Franklin, originally printed 
in Foor Eichard' s Almanac from 1733-58. 
Collected and edited by Paul Leicester 
Ford (New York, 1890: G. P. Putnam's 
Sons [Knickerbocker E^uggets]). 
Selections from the Writings of 
Benjamin Franklin. Edited by U. 
Waldo Cutler (:N'ew York [1905] : Crowell 
& Co. [Handy Volume Classics]). Con- 
tains a sketch of Franklin's life. 
The Wisdom of Benjamin Franklin: 
being reflections and observations of men 
and events, not included in Poo)^ Eichard s 
Almanac. Chosen from his collected 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 153 

papers, with introduction by John J. 
Murphy (New York, 1906: Brentano). 

works about franklin 
Fisher, Sydney George. The True 
Benjamin Franklin. (Philadelphia, 
1899: J. B. LippincottCo.) 
Ford, Paul Leicester. The Many- 
sided Franklin. (Kew York, 1899: 
The Century Co.) If one were obliged 
to limit himself to the reading of a single 
work relating to Franklin, — excepting 
always the Autobiography, — Mr. Ford's 
book might surely be that one. He 
unearthed many hidden or stray facts, 
and combined them in a vivid and pict- 
uresque fashion. 

Hale, Edward Everett, and Edward 
Everett Hale, Jr. Franklin in 
France. From original documents, 
most of which are now published for the 
first time. (Boston, 1887-88: Eoberts 
Brothers. 2 vols. ) 
MoMaster, John Bach. Benjamin 



154 BIBLIOGEAPHY 

Franklin as a Man of Letters. 
(Boston, 1887 : Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 
[American Men of Letters. ] ) Still holds 
its place as a satisfactory consideration 
of the literary side of Franklin's life, 
and a worthy companion to: 
Morse, John Torrey, Jr. Benjamin 
Franklin. (Boston, 1889: Houghton, 
Mifflin & Co. [American Statesmen.]) 
Various later editions. A short, yet com- 
prehensive account of Franklin's career, 
with emphasis on the political side. 

More, Paul Elmer. Benjamin 
Franklin. (Boston, 1900 : Houghton, 
Mifflin & Co. [Eiverside Biographical 
Series.] ) A compact account, showing an 
intimate and critical knowledge. 

Parton, James. Life and Times of 
Benjamin Franklin. (IS'ew York, 1864 : 
Mason. 2 vols.) Lively and readable, 
like everything Parton wrote. A good 
appetiser for the more solid feast of the 
later estimates. 



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